The Survivalist / the deck Digestif · La Carte

The Survivalist

A sealed box that carries a library, listens to the spectrum, runs on sunlight and answers to any screen that comes near it.

compute

Pi 5, 8 GB

library

1 TB offline

radio

RX + 868 mesh

power

solar, 256 Wh

Three steps down one staircase: read the archive online, keep a copy on a drive, or put the copy in a box that makes its own power. Most people stop at the first step, and that is fine.

The cheap way first

Before the drawings, the thing nobody selling a cyberdeck tells you.

A decent tablet in a dry bag does most of this. The Kiwix app reads the same archives from an SD card and can serve them over Wi-Fi to other devices, which is the deck's supposed trick. A mesh node talks to a phone over Bluetooth, which is how most people run one anyway. An SDR dongle works over USB-OTG. The screen is better, the battery lasts days at reading loads, and it charges from any power bank or a panel with a USB socket, with no 12 V rail, no charge controller and no bulkhead connectors.

So why build the box

• It is furniture, not a device. It sits in a cellar, a shed or a boat and serves everyone at once, while every phone in the room stays charged for its own use. A tablet doing this job is a tablet you have given away.
• It says where it stands with the power off. The e-paper holds battery, address and service state indefinitely. A sleeping tablet is a black rectangle.
• Nothing in it is glued shut. Every part is replaceable with a screwdriver and orderable separately in ten years. Tablets last until the battery swells.

That is a narrow case, and it is not survival. It is "this thing lives somewhere and does a job". If your honest need is offline reference for yourself, buy the bag, take route two and skip the rest of this page without guilt.

The remaining reason is the one this menu was built on: everything here is built, not bought. That is a legitimate reason to spend a weekend, and a bad reason to claim the result is optimal.

Route one: what it has to do

Four rules that settle every later argument.

• It works alone. Panel, keyboard and pointer are on the box. No phone, no tablet, nothing to forget at home. The e-paper stays legible with the power off.
• It serves everyone else. The deck raises its own Wi-Fi and hands out the whole library over HTTP. Any browser in range gets maps, articles, the spectrum view and the InvisibleChaos apps, with no client to install.
• It listens, it doesn't shout. Receive-only across HF to UHF. The single transmitter is 25 mW of licence-exempt LoRa on 868. No licence, no exam, no antenna tuner.
• It survives the winter. The battery carries the dark weeks, the panel refills them. Duty cycle is a design input, not a failure.

Inside

The battery sets the case size. Everything else fits around it.

Power

Berlin, 52°N. The honest version.

A Pi 5 with an NVMe drive and a dongle awake pulls about 9 W. The supervisor and the e-paper together sit near 0.1 W and can hold the display indefinitely. So the whole question is how many minutes a day the Pi is allowed to be awake.

Bill of materials

EU retail including VAT, September 2026. Indicative only: board and storage prices have moved sharply this year and stock comes and goes. Check every line before ordering.

Two traps in that list

The official M.2 HAT+ takes 2230 and 2242 drives only. Most 1 TB sticks sold are 2280, so either buy a 2242 drive or swap the HAT for a Pimoroni NVMe Base, which accepts the long ones.

And the V4 dongle reaches HF through a built-in upconverter rather than the direct sampling the V3 used. Same result on the band, different setting in the software.

Route two: the archive

No hardware required. A drive, a free reader, an afternoon of downloading.

This is the half that does the work. Everything below is openly licensed, fetched over plain HTTP and readable offline forever after. Kiwix packs whole websites into single .zim files; kiwix-serve turns a folder of them into a local website that any browser on the network can open.

The core set

The archive name downloads the file. open reads the same archive online, on Kiwix's servers, with nothing stored locally. Try it there first and download only what you would miss.

Kiwix filenames carry their dump date and disappear when superseded. If a link 404s, open the archive index or library.kiwix.org and take the newest file with the same name stem.

Worth adding

• Hesperian field medicine. Where There Is No Doctor and Where There Is No Dentist, free from hesperian.org. Written for places without a hospital, which is the whole point.
• Public-domain field manuals. FM 21-76 and the rest of the survival series sit on archive.org. Old, uneven, occasionally wrong, still the reference everyone copies.
• German civil protection. The BBK preparedness guides, in German, written for exactly this country's failure modes.

Pull it down

mkdir -p ~/archive && cd ~/archive

# -c resumes; these are big files and your connection will drop
wget -c https://lb.download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/wikipedia_en_all_nopic_2026-06.zim
wget -c https://lb.download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/wikipedia_de_all_maxi_2026-01.zim
wget -c https://lb.download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/wikipedia_en_medicine_maxi_2026-04.zim
wget -c https://download.geofabrik.de/europe/germany/berlin-latest.osm.pbf

Read it

# one folder becomes a local website on port 8080
kiwix-serve --port 8080 ~/archive/*.zim

Reader and server binaries for every platform are at kiwix.org. Point a phone at the machine's address and the whole library is there, no account, no connection. The .osm.pbf files load into Organic Maps or OsmAnd for offline navigation.

On the deck this same folder sits on the NVMe drive and the box serves it over its own Wi-Fi. On a laptop it is a folder. The archive does not know the difference.

Still open

Whether the keyboard lives inside the lid or clips on, which would shrink the case again. Whether the supervisor also drives a small always-on GPS fix. And whether the deck should mount the Radzeugnis and Radfunk! tile stacks as first-class services or just serve them as files.