A developer ran a Tailscale VPN gateway on an ESP32-S3 microcontroller using the MicroLink project. Compared to a Raspberry Pi Zero, the ESP32 boots in 2 seconds vs 30, draws only 0.5W vs 1.5W, and has no SD card failure risk. The main challenge was enabling PSRAM to handle TLS handshakes. Once running, it serves as an SSH jump host and hosts an HTTP server for wake-on-LAN. Bandwidth is limited, making it unsuitable for video streaming but adequate for lightweight remote access.
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