I've worked on Veilid related items off and on since just before it officially launched, and absolutely love what it can do and how it can be used in ways that promote privacy and security on the internet. I've even built a proof of concept social network using Veilid to show that it's possible to do such things successfully (albeit with some intentional differences from traditional social media...).
One of the things I've heard mentioned a few times here and there is the idea of running Veilid on low cost low power hardware... the very hardware I base a LOT of my projects on. In the words of Barney Stinson... Challenge Accepted!
For this project, I turned to my beefiest MCU, the ESP32-S3 Dev Kit running with 16mb of flash and 8mb of PSRAM. I wanted as much space as I could get to have the best chances of success - after all, if I can remove SOME of the constraints, I should. The whole point is to see if the MCU can do it. (hint: it can).
As it turns out, it is definitely possible to run Veilid on an ESP32-S3, but it's not super easy and it required some modifications to Veilid to make it work (mainly around timeouts that needed to be lengthened due to very slow cryptographic operations on the ESP32... no math co-processor after all).
This is just a proof of concept - it's not intended to be used for production nodes, I merely wanted to demonstrate that it can be done.
Feel free to take the code and run with it - it's provided as-is with no warranties or guarantees or obligations on my part.