Interesting... lots of devices (industrial control, PBXs, even smart thermostats, etc.) have debug Tx/Rx pins with no authentication at all.

We have very small ESP32 boards so plug those in, find a power pin (most controllers will have a 5v/3.3v with headroom enough for esp32 to work) and bam, you're in.

Reminds me of the Raspberry Pi in a thermostat episode from Mr. Robot (but that needed a lot more power and was physically larger)

Wow, this is great! I needed a device like this last week to connect remotely to an old PBX. Ended up setting up a Debian laptop and SSHing into it, then accessing the serial port using tio. I was thinking about getting some pi-adjacent device if I needed to do this long-term, but an ESP32 would be even better.

Is it possible to run some kind of OS that can run `busybox` on ESP32?

Nice for all those vintage Unix boxes that never had ethernet ports, but had bunches of RS-232's...

I wonder if someone already did the opposite and hung one of these tiny things on a classic Mac serial port and used it to ssh into other computers. I know there are a couple of wifi modem emulators using tiny modules like this.

Are there any ready made boards with esp32 and this ENC28J60 ethernet controller? I've used wemos/lolin and nodemcu but never saw an Ethernet option sadly.

Micropython runs on the esp32. Packs a huge punch imo