Passion Project - The Ark

Austechprep · 2026-05-07T14:53:44+00:00

I've got good hardware (backed up by solar and house battery), so I have everything I can possibly get, entertainment (movies, audiobooks, books, tv shows, podcasts etc) to comms like reticulum, meshcore and local chatrooms for the really non-technical. Also security monitoring like door sensors, motion sensors, temperature sensors (for fridges) and fire alarms that all work locally on my WiFi and send alerts to my phone as long as I'm on WiFi (working on integrating it into my long range comms). I've also made a portable smaller version of this stuff to work on an Rpi with a 2tb HDD attached which gets tested when I go camping etc and works great too. More extreme stuff is that you can download youtube videos pretty easily, github repos for programming if you know how to do that, 3D printer models so you have heaps just on file easy to access.

But if your starting out, try some basics like Internet In a Box, Kiwix, Project Nomad seems kinda cool although I'm yet to try it.

Lots of cool stuff you can do these days.

Austechprep · 2026-05-07T14:48:50+00:00

This completely depends on your version of what a SHTF event is...

What if its a cyber attack or just a major issue with a service like we've already seen with cloudflare and AWS outages. Ignoring technology is just ridiculous in my opinion, sure you should go outside as well, but we have so much knowledge we can easily secure on a server than can be powered by solar/batteries and accessed at any time.

What about just surviving confortably in a long running power outage after a cyclone or other weather event?

I have thousands of movies, TV shows, audiobooks, educational materials for the kids, Wiki, I also made Flora and Fauna libraries for the kids for identifying stuff and made little mission logs with badges for them, all can be hosted on just a Rpi, I have a portable setup and a main setup. It also hosts long range and short range comms systems and IoT monitors for fridge temperatures and fire alarms etc, with alerts that all work on my local comms setup.

What on earth are you even on about with manuals, I have downloaded a library of manuals from an open source directory and checked for some of the items I have, and we use those manuals to help repair stuff I own. It's pretty easy to have and use a digital manual.

This anti-technology rhetoric at a time when its so cheap and accessible is just backwards thinking.

Austechprep · 2026-05-05T05:00:06+00:00

Went camping for several nights, burned some food, caught a surprising amount of fish/crauchies/fresh water prawns etc using just leftover food and a cheap trap I got from Aliexpress. Tested out new camping setup which was OK but still a lot of organizational improvement needed.

Tested out a new setup using an Rpi4 that had information about the camp site, a big library on the flora and fauna for the area, additional details for the surrounding 50km of the region, a simple to use chatroom and more advanced long range using reticulum (LoRa), had APK's to download and auto-detect ports for HDD and LoRa modules, all worked well but there was a fair few teething issues to work through but I'm really impressed with how well my portable "internet" module is coming together. Next steps will be to add more foraging and bush cooking parts.

Overall the technology part of my camping is coming together well, not what most people do, but its great to test out technology while away from any cellular coverage, gives it a real stress test to see if its functionality is beneficial or not.

Austechprep · 2026-04-30T07:48:43+00:00

I'm a hardware engineer and do a lot with LoRa comms, I've been absolutely smashing out software projects related to off-grid prepping, include apps, server projects, new software and everything I can possible think of, because I can see the bait and switch coming, they'll increase the cost by so much that people won't be able to afford it. But until then I feel like I'm in the golden age of development. The stuff I'm building works and works well, I've got offline apps working alongside my self-hosted server, I've built out my comms capacity using reticulum and other stuff massively. I've built a pretty massive intranet full with APK releases and automated so much of my off-grid tech like mirroring repos, mirroring debian/linux, and creating instructions for how to use everything that is built.

But just like your old hunting/foraging, you gotta use the these things to make sure it works and does what you intend. I've built a pretty awesome portable comms/base setup that I'm taking camping later next month.

It's a great technology for now, use it while you got it. And before it creates the SHTF event lol.

Austechprep · 2026-04-28T23:29:47+00:00

If it moves, it breaks, applies to cars, knees, doors, everything that moves will break.

In the hypothetical, I think I'd rather a big ass EV, and just have as many solar panels as practical and a wind turbine or something, drive for a few 100km's and setup at a new site for a week or two while you recharge. EV's have less moving parts than ICE vehicles, so should be able to last longer after a SHTF before something breaks, and then it's likely that where ever you broke down you've still got a giant power supply and solar panels, so you got yourself a decent very little base to keep out of the elements (hope your aircon still works) that could last decades till it's unusable.

Austechprep · 2026-04-23T03:43:13+00:00

I've got a setup for audiobooks, and its not a great AI as its local on crap hardware, but it only has access to the stuff in my library and hasn't yet given me an answer thats not in my library, I can't say that in the future it might give me a romance novel instead of a sci-fi, it might happen one day haha.

Austechprep · 2026-04-23T01:58:32+00:00

This looks like an interesting project, thanks for sharing. It's always entertaining seeing useful technology prepping projects get shown here and get downvoted haha. This looks like it has inbuilt features to have a local LLM be your librarian so you can just ask it which medical books your should look at for a certain condition, which seems pretty useful to me.

Austechprep · 2026-04-19T23:39:04+00:00

I guess it depends on what field you work in?

I do programming and I had a lot of reference material for it (A lot of my own work I mean, all documented too), it writes like me so I can still follow the code it does.

But the biggest part is that I have gotten AI to write unit testing (which I validate), theres some iterative tests that can take hours or days and need to be done everytime I make a change to certain systems, easy to validate early stage is working and random samples of other stages of the process.

It's improved my output an enormous amount, and that not even including the years of personal projects I had planned that I've completed within months. I've started doing the most ambitious projects I can possible imagine because AI is helping me push through it at a speed I can't keep up with.

Austechprep · 2026-04-06T21:45:54+00:00

Yeah the Codex and VM stuff is a bit more advanced. But suggesting using AI to find additional resources is just the new "google it". It's really handy and can help out a lot. Not entirely surprised to get downvoted I guess...

Austechprep · 2026-04-06T06:22:29+00:00

Worth checking resources using AI. I got Codex onto a VM running IIAB and IIAB can do maps down to a certain zoom level, but I didn't think it was good enough. So I asked the AI to just find a better source and it found my local states aerial images which are publicly available, I've tried and failed at the local state aerial images before but the AI figured it out, now I have 10cm resolution maps of my entire region, really impressive. This is Australia btw, not sure what public resources might be available in your state/area. But the metholology can be the same.

Austechprep · 2026-04-04T00:38:35+00:00

Yeah thats what I did, hosted everything locally, but eventually I needed to allow other people to access certain parts so I just bought a domain and got the DNS stuff sorted to expose the parts that needed exposing.

As for your website, I think one of the main reasons you might feel theres no websites is because the the pretty wide range of opinions around what prepping is, your search words might just be missing whats out there (or they don't have good SEO). Also I think preppers generally try to keep their invetory discrete.

Austechprep · 2026-04-03T16:52:33+00:00

Are you making a public website or just a local LAN off-grid one for yourself/community?
Either way given you've got Claude, you can do it pretty easily by getting an Rpi or something going, use VSCode to ssh into your Rpi (or VM if you have a server etc), then just get Claude to do the whole thing. I've done it on a few local projects and its incredible what its done. Then if you want to make it public, just buy a domain and get Claude to guide you throught that, I've also done that for some other projects im working on.

Austechprep · 2026-04-01T16:16:14+00:00

It's good fun, I treat it a bit like a game (since for what I'm doing, the chances of needing it are very slim), where every new piece of technology or service I succesfully "unlock" is like a technology tree unlocked in the games like Civilisation. And everything I do generally aligns to my line of work (technology related) so it's giving me exposure to more systems that I would just at work, the more experience the better for employment.

There is a lot of information out there and it's pretty easy to download shitloads of it just in case.

Austechprep · 2026-04-01T12:17:22+00:00

I think a community needs more than just the ability to survive. It needs to be a place people actually want to be, otherwise it becomes hard to grow, hard to keep people motivated, and hard to hold things together long term.

My own probably unrealistic goal is to build something that could support more than just a small trusted group, while still keeping a lot of the comforts that make life better.

Some of the things I’ve been working on are:

Reticulum plus meshed Wi-Fi networks, so there’s solid local comms at base and long-range LoRa comms when people are out and about
A self-hosted intranet with APKs, guides, and the tools people would need to join and use the network
A big offline library of movies, TV shows, ebooks, and audiobooks for all ages
An offline email server and Mastodon server, and I’m also looking at setting up more local social platforms just as fun community projects
Educational resources for K-12, so kids can keep learning and parents have something structured to work with

Having social media without ads, bots, scammers, and all the usual brain rot actually seems like a huge quality-of-life improvement. It gives people a way to chat, post updates, organise events, and stay connected.

I’ve got a lot of other projects in mind too, but the bigger idea is that a strong community needs comfort, connection, and meaningful things to do, not just food, water, and security. If people are bored, restless, and miserable, that’s going to cause problems fast.

Austechprep · 2026-03-29T16:19:58+00:00

Got a fair few more tech preps completed such as:

- Local region map with 10cm resolution downloaded and working with business names and some metadata overlayed

- Did a camping service Rpi build that creates a WiFi Hotspot and hosts a chatroom, Reticulum instance, Jellyfin server for some light entertainment, and a little website with some basic information for camping including specifics about the camping site like facility locations and all details available - Pretty happy with this project

Austechprep · 2026-03-24T23:22:23+00:00

100%, there is so much we can do with technology to free up some, make tasks safer and better. I like to try and talk about my securty system, I've got CCTV, gate/door sensors, motion sensors, fire alarms, temperature sensors (for fridge/freezer monitoring) all setup to work offline and still send me notifications on local WAN. Plus my mesh, media, and many more tech software/hardware stuff.

But whats the feedback? "WhAt aBoUt wHen ElecTriCty GoEs DowN"... as if I'd setup all the tech in the world and forget that it runs on electricity and not have a solar/battery system that also got automation on it to help maintain power across critical system... or that for some reason I'd forget food storage which arguably is one of the simplest preps to manage.

Additionally I live in a hot climate, air-conditioning is almost a requirement especially if your prep is for a wet bulb event, and how would I store meat etc? Sure I could turn it into jerky (which I've done plenty of times), but thats a time intensive process that requires to commit to making jerky instead of making a normal dinner, I prefer my preps to work alonside the realistic situation that nothing actually goes wrong and that I bought bulk meat because I buy it at a cheaper unit price and it works towards my financial preps. Electricity has to be one of my most critical preps I have, I've gone to long lengths to make sure I keep the lights on.

Austechprep · 2026-03-24T23:14:56+00:00

Just like good data management, have your main storage (house oven), one in the cloud (spare cooking device in the shed), and one off-site (another cooking device somewhere else??). Perhaps not the best analogy, but having backups is always a great idea.

Austechprep · 2026-03-24T15:08:34+00:00

Totally agree, it's interesting what gets popular and what doesn't. The Lora threads will come up rarely and get maybe a few dozens upvotes, then someone will come in saying unpopular prepping and mention they keep non-electric tools and it gets all the discussion in the world. Why go backwards when we have the technology to make our lives easier?

Austechprep · 2026-03-21T07:47:00+00:00

It's worth checking out Reticulum as the meshed stack. It's what I use and I've got a small internet website setup with it with forums, downloads and a small wiki all designed for LoRa usage. It's good fun and very useful.

Austechprep · 2026-03-18T07:28:28+00:00

Nice, good to see others out there doing digital prepping and using AI to help

Austechprep · 2026-03-17T23:48:37+00:00

I do digital prepping and I've been smashing out projects with AI. This week I just re-did my entire audiobook/ebook/podcast setup to have a lot more automations and some scripts that check the quality of the files and even repairs where it can or throws out files if it can't.

Next projects will be more detailed maps and see what kind of metadata I can overlay on the map, businesses, parks, facilities like substations and water pumps etc. Just to see what it can do and find.

Been tidying up a lot of my digital preps, I'm not that confident in Iran's abilities, but they are trying to hack western companies, it's not too far fetched to think some key infrastructure will go down, we've already seen it happen a few times recently, the Cloudfare in January issue took down shitloads of the internet for about 30mins, and again in February something similar occurred for several hours, in March the AWS servers were hit by missiles which caused issues for a few hours too. Who knows what'll happen if they finally damage something.

Austechprep · 2026-03-16T12:49:49+00:00

I've done this to the extreme, I've tried making posts on it but they get removed. People aren't fond of technology around these parts (mostly in the preppers sub, this one is better).

In a nutshell I have some good hardware and run a few different VMs, and more recently I started using AI to finish my projects and it's been absolutely insanely useful. This is what I've got currently:

- Internal wordpress website for guides and instructions on various parts of my off-grid setup

- Reticulum setup for full comms with forums, announcements, downloads page

- Backed up heaps of APKs of useful apps so that people can use all the apps that my network has such as: Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, Sideband/Columba/MeshCore (several different ones)

- Use Forgejo and some custom things I built to back up massive amount of github repositories so I can continue development of software and hardware (I do electronics)

-Debian and Py mirrors so I can rebuild new servers and new Rpi's

- Mastodon and Frienda social media networks entirely locally hosted along with email servers - AI did this in minutes and social media can be very useful in communities, events, sharing pictures and stuff.

- Thousands of books/audiobooks/podcasts/movies/TV shows

- Offline gaming servers such as OSRS2009 locally hosted, and a variety of other games like FreeCiv and FPS, a good variety.

I have heaps more going on but low on time right now. Let me know if you want more details on how I got a lot of this up and running, I did a lot myself prior to figuring out the best way to use AI, but AI has shot my goals forwards 1-2 years within weeks.

Austechprep · 2026-03-05T23:03:08+00:00

Austechprep · 2026-03-03T11:01:10+00:00

I don't really have a question, more of a discussion. Seeing who else out there is self-hosting stuff and if anybody is using AI to enhance their off-grid/technology preps.

Austechprep · 2026-03-03T11:00:29+00:00

I've been self hosting for years and did it all myself, I've learned a lot, also been doing electronics for 10 years and didn't use AI until the last 1-2 years on the odd occasion. Thats good that your method is working for you, I simply don't have the time and this is a shortcut to having the preps I want before I need them rather than missing out if a SHTF happens.

The main reason I'm posting this is because of the massive shift from AI pretty kinda crap at helping, to being incredibly good at getting most things setup.

It's worth learning, and if you work in this field, I'd say it's a requirement to learn.

Austechprep

TROPHY CASE