ESPKVM

ESP-KVM turns an ESP32-P4 board and an HDMI capture board into an IP-KVM: another computer's screen, keyboard and mouse in your browser. Nothing is installed on that computer, so it works where remote desktop cannot - in the BIOS, at a boot menu, on a machine that will not start or has no OS.

It is not a small Linux computer but one firmware image on a microcontroller: nothing to maintain, nothing for a power cut to corrupt, no shell or SSH to secure, and a failed update rolls itself back. The trade-off is about 20-24 fps at 1080p rather than 60.

It runs on fifteen ESP32-P4 boards from Waveshare, Espressif, M5Stack, DFRobot, Guition and VIEWE, and is flashed from the browser. Live demo: https://demo.espkvm.io

Video and control

• HDMI capture up to 1080p, MJPEG or hardware H.264
• USB keyboard, absolute and relative mouse, media keys
• Paste text as keystrokes in five keyboard layouts
• Wake-on-LAN and ATX power control
• Several viewers, one in control at a time
• Phone and tablet: touch trackpad, on-screen keyboard, installs as an app

Virtual media

• Boot from a disk image on a microSD card (FAT32 or exFAT)
• A real DVD drive, images over 4 GB
• A rescue image in the device's own flash

Reading the screen

• Reads BIOS and console screens as text you can copy
• Text instead of video on a slow link
• Watches for phrases, notices a stop screen or a blank one

Recording

• Recordings and screenshots on the microSD card
• A dashcam: keeps the last minutes and saves an MP4 on a stop screen, a watched phrase or a power cut, and can send it to Telegram
• Timelapse, and search a recording by the text on screen

Automation

• Key macros, and runbooks that wait for words on the screen (DuckyScript accepted)
• A cron scheduler
• Notifications to Telegram or a webhook
• A REST API for scripts and AI agents

Network and access

• Ethernet, PoE and Wi-Fi on the boards that have them, with a setup hotspot
• Native Tailscale (or Headscale) and WireGuard in the firmware: no port forward, no vendor cloud
• HTTPS with its own certificate or yours, login, physical password reset

Integrations and upkeep

• Home Assistant over MQTT: sensors, power buttons, a camera, runbooks as buttons
• Network updates with automatic rollback, any release installable
• Settings backup, diagnostics, an optional small status screen

Free and open source (Apache-2.0). No account, cloud or subscription.