esp32_nat_router

• NAT Routing: Full WiFi NAT router with IP forwarding (15+ Mbps throughput)
• WireGuard VPN: Optional VPN tunnel for upstream traffic with automatic MSS clamping and Path MTU
• DHCP Reservations: Assign fixed IPs to specific MAC addresses
• Port Forwarding: Map external ports to internal devices
• Firewall: Define ACL to restrict or monitor traffic
• PCAP Capture: Live packet capture can be streamed to Wireshark or other network tools
• WPA2-Enterprise Support: Connect to corporate networks (PEAP, TTLS, TLS) and convert them to WPA2-PSK
• 5 GHz WiFi: Dual-band support on ESP32-C5 with configurable band preference (auto/2.4 GHz/5 GHz)
• Ethernet Support: Use a W32-ET01 board with LAN8720 PHY to get Ethernet uplink
• Web Interface: Web UI with password protection for easy configuration
• Serial Console: Full CLI for advanced configuration
• Remote Console: Network-accessible CLI via TCP (password protected, per-interface binding)
• LED Status Indicator: Visual feedback via plain GPIO LED or addressable LED strip (WS2812/SK6812) with color-coded status
• OLED Display: Status display on 72x40 I2C SSD1306 OLEDs (as found on some ESP32-C3 mini boards)
• MQTT Home Assistant: Publish telemetry and per-client stats to MQTT with HA auto-discovery
• MCP Bridge (AI-Ready): BETA - Control the router from AI assistants (Claude, etc.) via the Model Context Protocol
• mDNS: The router is reachable as esp32-nat-router.local via mDNS/Bonjour — no need to look up the IP address.
• OTA Updates: Flash new firmware directly from the Web UI

The maximum number of simultaniously connected WiFi clients is 8 (5 on the ESP32c3) due to RAM limitations (uses about 5KB per client). Each of the features: Web Interface, PCAP Capture, Wireguard VPN, Remote Console, WPA Enterprise and MQTT Home Assistant require several KB of additional RAM. So using all of them at once will probably burst the ESP32's ressources. Unused/disabled features are optimized for minimal to no RAM usage. Have a look at remaining heap size if in doubt.

The performance of the Router depends on several factors, of course including WiFi signal strength and congestion of the used frequencies. Expect something in the range from 5 - 15 mbps under reasonable conditions. Single video streams should be possible, but it is not intended as a 2$ full replacement for a professional home router.

Internally the speed depends on the processing power of the used ESP32 chip (single core vs. dual core, clock speed) and available RAM for buffering. All "hot pathes", i.e. the direct routing of packets are optimized, any additional features, especially VPN, ACL processing, per client statistics, and packet capturing, introduce some delays. If you need maximum speed, dynamically disable all unused features in the configuration. However in default config everything is already disabled, the only major feature, that is running, is the web interface. Especially on the C3 and C5 with small RAM (and combined DRAM and IRAM) disabling it can result in an additional performance boost, due to the additional buffer space. If required, you can re-enable it via the remote console at any time (with a reboot).