I was pleased with my last post on getting TinyLibrary up and running on an ESP32 (and WOOOO got a PR accepted to the ESP-IDF codebase for the standard ESP32 firmware for DHCP option 114), but really wanted something with some more RF and speed oomph. I worked on an off for a while to get a captive portal + DNS + DHCP working on Ubuntu 24 on a RasPi Zero 2W but kept getting blocked by random issues. I finally decided to abandon my NetworkManager approach (turns out the dnsmasq-base plugin that it uses won’t read my DHCP configs even when they’re in the right place >.>) and finally went with the tried and tested combo of hostapd and full-scale dnsmasq and things went real smooth.

I updated the repo with instructions (https://github.com/jkingsman/TinyLibrary) and also posted a gist so I might spare others pain.

And now I finally have a 200mA (hefty but manageable) TinyLibrary that can crank when it’s serving a 600meg ebook!