As seen on The Modern Rogue
Project NOMAD is a free, open-source server you install on a computer you already own. It holds a full copy of Wikipedia, thousands of books, offline maps, a complete education library, and a private AI that can read all of it. Once it is on your drive, none of it needs a connection.
100% free and 100% open source. No account, no subscription, nothing phoning home.
austinmesh.orgBrian, Chris, and Tommy Ekstrand of Austin Mesh put a NOMAD server on a LoRa radio mesh, went on an away team mission, and asked it questions over Meshtastic using NOMAD's offline LLM. No internet, and no cell service involved. Completely offline.
Episode 1 · 18 min · July 22, 2026
Start here if you have not seen it. Brian takes the full tour of what fits on one box and what you can still do with it once the connection is gone.
What you are getting
Project NOMAD installs onto a PC you already own. You pick your apps and content and it downloads as much as your drive will hold. Everything below runs locally, on your hardware, on your network.
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A full copy of Wikipedia with pictures, thousands of books from Project Gutenberg, medical and drug references, and repair and how-to guides.
Powered by Ollama
A large language model running on your own hardware that can read the library to answer your question. Nothing is sent anywhere. Skip it and everything else still works.
Powered by OpenStreetMap
Street-level map data stored on the box. Zoom from continents down to individual streets with no connection.
Powered by Kolibri
Khan Academy courses, videos, and interactive lessons. A complete K-12 curriculum, offline.
It also keeps itself updated while you still have a connection, so the day the internet goes down you are not stuck with a stale snapshot from whenever you set it up.
Start here
Any 64-bit PC you already own works. A mini PC, an old desktop, a laptop. More storage means more library, and a GPU makes the AI answer faster, but neither is required to start.
See tested hardwareOne command on Ubuntu or Debian sets up everything. You need an internet connection for this part, because this is where it downloads the content.
Installation guideEasy Setup asks what you care about and pulls it down in the background. Come back later and it is all sitting on your own hardware.
Common questionsThe mesh part
Mesh radio is how you cover that distance. These are small, inexpensive LoRa radios that talk directly to each other on 915 MHz and form their own network. No cell towers, no internet, no monthly fee, and a range measured in miles. They pass text messages and location between each other, and any radio in range relays for the rest, so the network gets better as more people join it.
In the video, NOMAD joins that network as a node. You text a question from a handheld, it travels over the radio mesh to the server, the local AI reads the offline library and works through it, and the answer comes back over the same radios about twenty seconds later. You can query the whole library from a handheld, miles from the box, with nothing in between but radio.
NOMAD runs custom apps, and the local AI sits on the same box with an open door to everything stored on it, which is why this build was possible at all. But the bridge between the radios and the AI was hand-assembled over a night of work. There is no button for it in the product today.
What does ship, in one click from Supply Depot, are the Meshtastic and MeshCore control panels, so you can configure your radios and read your mesh from a full-size screen instead of squinting at your phone.
New features are being built into Project NOMAD all the time. Use the roadmap to see what the community has requested, and vote on your favorites.
See the roadmapTommy Ekstrand runs Austin Mesh, and he is the reason the radio side of the episode worked. It is a volunteer community network covering the Austin area, and they have published what they learned building it: platform comparisons, hardware recommendations, DIY solar repeaters, aerial node placement, and the mast build from the video.
Worth reading even if you live nowhere near Texas. Their whole site is published under a share-alike license so other groups can copy it.
Start here if none of this makes sense yet.
The two competing networks, compared without a dog in the fight.
What to actually buy, including DIY solar repeaters.
Setup guides for both platforms, plus the community guidelines.
Not in Austin? They wrote down how to build one where you are.
Tommy's searchable index of every mesh radio and antenna.
The gear
A usable node runs about $25 to $30, and it is a fun weekend project on its own. These are the specific units from the episode, listed on Tommy's device database. No affiliate links, no referral codes.
The radio wired to the NOMAD box
Plugs into the same network as the server and puts it on the mesh as a node. This is the piece that lets a question travel from a handheld to the AI and back.
The handheld with a keyboard
A self-contained radio with a screen and a physical keyboard, so you can type a message without pairing a phone to anything.
The radios paired to phones
Pocket-sized nodes that connect to a phone over Bluetooth. Your phone becomes the keyboard and the radio does the rest.
The extending antenna mast
Austin Mesh publishes the full build. Height is the biggest factor in how far a LoRa node reaches, and this is a cheap way to buy a lot of it.
New to all of this? meshtastic.org is the place to start.
Project NOMAD is 100% free and open source, and runs on hardware you may already have lying around. Full hardware recommendations and installation resources are available.
More from Chris at Crosstalk Solutions, and more from Brian at The Modern Rogue.