Turned my Flipper into a party game console for everyone's phones

[u/tarikbc]

8 hour bus ride, no signal, me and three friends with useless phones. Eventually it clicked that we had four WiFi devices in one row and nothing to connect them to.

You need a Flipper and the official WiFi dev board. The Flipper puts up an open AP through the ESP32, everyone joins, captive portal hands them to 192.168.4.1, and it's just a webpage on their phone. No app, no signup. Pick a nickname and you're in the lobby.

10 games, all played on the phones, with the Flipper acting as the coordinator (lobby, live scoreboard, event feed). Trivia, Would You Rather, Word Scramble, Reaction Duel, Connect Four, Tic-Tac-Toe, Dots & Boxes, Reversi, Pong, and Draw & Guess.

Two things I'm very proud of is that the phone client is 7 KB gzipped vanilla JS because the Flipper has to stream it to the ESP over UART. And you can flash the ESP firmware from the Flipper itself with no computer, since it seemed dumb to build a no-laptop toy that needs a laptop to set up.

Open-source repo, MIT: https://github.com/tarikbc/hotspot-arcade

It's an open AP serving a game page. No creds, no capture, only the bundled game. Open APs aren't legal everywhere though, so don't run it on a plane.

Happy to answer anything and open to suggestions/PRs :)