Developer builds 537,000-domain ad blocker on a $5 ESP32 chip using 50KB RAM

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A developer has engineered a compact ad-blocking solution running on an ESP32 microcontroller that costs roughly $5. The firmware manages a blocklist of 537,000 domains while consuming only around 50 kilobytes of RAM. The device functions as a DNS-based ad blocker, capable of responding to blocked domain lookups in as little as 10 milliseconds. The project demonstrates that effective network-level ad blocking can be achieved on extremely low-cost, resource-constrained hardware.

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