Off-Grid Academy UK
Volume 2 (Month 02 — February) • Sovereign Compute • 34 A4 Pages

Build Your Own "Project Alexandria": Offline Wikipedia, Medical Texts & Local LLMs on a £150 Pi 5

Step-by-step architecture for an air-gapped 12V DC sovereign knowledge & local AI server when subsea fibre fails.

Primary A4 Action Checklist

  1. Provision a Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB) or Intel N100 mini-PC with a 2TB NVMe SSD and native 12V DC step-down supply
  2. Install Kiwix-Serve and download verified .ZIM archives (Wikipedia Full, WikiMed, iFixit, StackExchange)
  3. Install Ollama with quantised Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct (Q4_K_M) for offline medical & engineering queries
  4. Configure hostapd + dnsmasq to broadcast an offline Wi-Fi captive portal accessible by up to 25 devices

Full Field Manual Text & Commissioning Notes

# OFF-GRID ACADEMY FIELD MANUAL 02 ## Build Your Own "Project Alexandria": Offline Wikipedia, Medical Texts & Local LLMs ### 1. The Amnesia of a Cloud-Dependent Society 99% of UK international internet traffic traverses roughly 60 subsea fibre cables landing in four shallow coastal bottlenecks. When broadband and cellular backhaul drop, households and businesses lose immediate access to drug dosage tables, mechanical repair tolerances, chemical stoichiometry, and UK street maps. ### 2. Target Power & Hardware Spec - **Compute Core:** Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB RAM) with official PCIe NVMe M.2 HAT+ OR Intel N100 fanless industrial mini-PC. - **Storage:** 2TB PCIe Gen3/Gen4 NVMe SSD (formatted `ext4`). - **Power:** 12V DC battery bus -> 5V/5A (25W) buck converter (draws just **6W idle / 11W under full AI inference**). ### 3. Essential Offline .ZIM Archives (Kiwix Repository) Download and verify SHA-256 checksums for these core archives into `/srv/kiwix/data/`: 1. `wikipedia_en_all_maxi.zim` (~104 GB) — Every English Wikipedia article with diagrams and schematics. 2. `mdwiki_en_all_maxi.zim` (~2.1 GB) — **WikiProject Medicine**: clinical diagnostics, pharmacology, and surgical procedures. 3. `ifixit_en_all.zim` (~45 GB) — Tear-down and repair guides for electronics, appliances, and vehicles. 4. `gutenberg_en_all.zim` (~75 GB) — 70,000+ classic scientific, agricultural, and historical texts. 5. `zimgit-post-disaster.zim` (~1.4 GB) — Curated civil engineering, water sanitation, and field hygiene reference. ### 4. Launching Kiwix & Local AI (Ollama) ```bash # 1. Start Kiwix Server on Port 8080 kiwix-serve --port=8080 /srv/kiwix/data/*.zim & # 2. Install & Run Offline LLM (Llama 3.1 8B Q4_K_M) ollama pull llama3.1:8b-instruct-q4_K_M ollama serve ``` ### 5. Faraday Storage Discipline Store a cold backup clone of your 2TB NVMe drive inside a double-layer nickel-copper Faraday pouch (>85dB attenuation) alongside a laminated boot cheatsheet.

Other Printable A4 Field Checklists

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Volume 2 (Build Your Own "Project Alexandria": Offline Wikipedia, Medical Texts & Local LLMs on a £150 Pi 5) cover?

Step-by-step architecture for an air-gapped 12V DC sovereign knowledge & local AI server when subsea fibre fails. It provides a 34-page A4 printable checklist for Both covering Provision a Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB) or Intel N100 mini-PC with a 2TB NVMe SSD and native 12V DC step-down supply; Install Kiwix-Serve and download verified .ZIM archives (Wikipedia Full, WikiMed, iFixit, StackExchange); Install Ollama with quantised Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct (Q4_K_M) for offline medical & engineering queries.

How can I download or print the A4 PDF for Build Your Own "Project Alexandria": Offline Wikipedia, Medical Texts & Local LLMs on a £150 Pi 5?

Download the direct PDF from /field-manuals/project-alexandria-offline-knowledge-ai-server.pdf or print this page directly to standard A4 paper with zero email gates.