PixelBoard Collaborative Real Time Canvas

A lightweight, real time collaborative monochrome 250×250 pixel canvas inspired by shared internet drawing spaces such as Reddit’s r/place. It provides an interactive canvas of 62,500 individual black-or-white pixels where users across the web can seamlessly view live edits and collaborate on pixel art in real time. Designed with smooth interactive controls including pan, zoom, and a visible pixel grid overlay, the application incorporates per-client rate limiting cooldowns to protect against automated spam and encourage deliberate, community driven canvas creation.

Architecturally, the application runs entirely on Cloudflare’s edge platform—utilizing Cloudflare Workers, Pages, Durable Objects, and R2 Storage—to achieve zero hosting costs while delivering sub-millisecond global state synchronization. To minimize bandwidth and RAM usage, the board uses a 1-bit bit-packing scheme that packs eight horizontal pixels per byte into a Uint8Array, compressing the entire 62,500 pixel canvas state into just 7.81 KB (7,813 bytes). Real time drawing updates are transmitted over WebSockets using compact 3-byte binary delta packets (16-bit pixel index + 8-bit color value), while state persistence is decoupled through throttled in memory writes to Durable Object storage and asynchronous flushes to Cloudflare R2 binary snapshot backups (board_latest.bin) to stay well within free tier API quotas.