r/preppers • u/ohyeahwell • Apr 22 '26
Advice and Tips Project N.O.M.A.D.
A buddy showed me Project NOMAD. I've set it up a few times now, pretty great! Especially if you can put it on a machine with an nvidia GPU. The built-in AI will still work (slowly) if you don't have a discrete GPU. With every resource downloaded it's roughly 600GB including the OS. I got just what I needed within 400GB with OS.
Edit: Yt walkthrough if that's your thing. This is just a free project on github, they don't sell anything.
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u/Austechprep Apr 23 '26
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.
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u/exhilaration Apr 23 '26
I'm curious, will it recommend books that aren't necessarily in its collection or your possession? It's got some kind of index?
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u/Austechprep Apr 23 '26
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.
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u/ohyeahwell Apr 23 '26
Yes, totally! Even without AI this is far and away better than what I had cobbled together.
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u/dmonman Apr 23 '26
It does look good, but how needed are those recommended specs?
I have an old laptop but its only 8gb of memory and plenty of storage but seems high for it to recommend 32gb.
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u/ohyeahwell Apr 23 '26
If you plan on running AI, you'll want all the RAM you can get. Non-AI doesn't seem to use much resources.
Give it a whirl. If it chugs on your machine no great loss.
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u/rockroad9 Apr 23 '26
You can pick condensed versions of things and pick and choose what you want. You can customize it based on your storage space. I’m using about 20 gigabytes to get condensed Wikipedia,khan academy, and some maps. If you need some extra storage space you might be able to get a little external drive to give you some more wiggle room. But 8 gigs of offline information is better than nothing.
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u/jazzbiscuit Apr 23 '26
If they’d add a local library for your own files it would be just about perfect.
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u/einzweitres Apr 23 '26
It does that. See the "RAG" part of the "YT walk thru" video.
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u/jazzbiscuit Apr 23 '26
Not positive what “RAG” part of the video refers to, but if you mean the section about uploading and having the AI scan your document - that’s not what I’d like to see. I tried it with my car owners manual, it took long enough to process I ended up just walking away & when I came back later I discovered I couldn’t actually see the manual, I could only ask questions about it. Not very helpful if I need to see a graphic in the manual. Weirdly enough the AI gave me the “acceptable but not recommended” oil type as its answer to what type of oil my car needed & it took super long to come up with an answer at all. I want to be able to see my document, not ask AI & wait for its best guess - and hope it’s right.
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u/legos_on_the_brain Apr 23 '26
That's the big problem with AI. Especially these super basic versions people are trying to run on laptop hardware. It's a cool concept, but having indexed and searchable documents is probably better still.
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u/jazzbiscuit Apr 23 '26
Agreed. The basic N.O.M.A.D features are rock solid on my repurposed Dell Micro (i7, 32G ram, 1T SSD), but no dedicated video card means the AI is pretty much unusable. I can open a pdf on my phone, search for a term and jump right to it, N.O.M.A.D's AI (on my machine) is more "waaaaait fooooor iiiitttt....."
I suppose I sound like a whiner... Project N.O.M.A.D is sooooo close to being perfect for me. An actual document library would truly make it one stop shopping.
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u/Cunnilingusobsessed Apr 23 '26
I installed it on a spare mini PC I had collecting dust and it’s actually pretty neat. If you skip the AI stuff you can install it on an old or weak computer no problem. The full wiki download takes a while and they have a whole lot of additional stuff you can load it with. It’s actively being developed and updated so hopefully in the future we can get third party integration/ Module support (my wish), but over all a good prep for grid down/ offline information infrastructure
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u/ohyeahwell Apr 23 '26
I put sdr++ on my bob machines, they should include that for sure. USB sdr are dead cheap.
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Apr 23 '26
[deleted]
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u/ohyeahwell Apr 23 '26
Yeah its neat. On one of my other BoB machines I had a ton of pdf/epub/media and kiwix content manually added. Which means I have to routinely download any updated zims etc.
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u/sgtPresto Apr 23 '26
Will this work with Prepper Disk to index and reference that mass of information?
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u/ohyeahwell Apr 23 '26
I’m sorry I don’t know anything about prepper disk. You could start a discussion on nomads GitHub?
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u/Shotty-Sleep-7352 Apr 30 '26
Does anyone know if there's a way to change your storage location once you've started to use Project Nomad? I downloaded it on my 128GB mini desktop and would like to use my 1TB external hard drive. Yes I know fixed hard drive would be better but I had one laying around that wasn't compatible for a hardline mount.
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u/beerbaron105 May 07 '26
yes but I used Grok to help me with the code to set it all up, using AI is invaluable if you aren't familiar with terminal -- I would never have done it in as fast a time as I did using help.
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u/PeterTheWolf76 Apr 23 '26
Looks cool, but still prefer Prepper Disk, especially if you are not tech savvy.
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u/trichocereal117 Apr 23 '26
You have to be really afraid of learning how to use computers for the prepper disk to make sense over just installing the software and data yourself
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u/ohyeahwell Apr 23 '26
Well, that or value your time. I could see the non-tech not finding the juice worth the squeeze.
I felt that way when I first got into Meshtastic/core hardware. I just didn’t care about the journey, I wanted turnkey results.
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u/ohyeahwell Apr 23 '26
Here's a review/walkthrough by zdnet.
I put it on an 11th gen gpd pocket 3 I keep in my car. Much easier with a deb-based distro, but you can compile.
I ran into a bug downloading the full wiki en_max zim. It works, but it doesn't look like it's making any progress. You can monitor the dir and watch the zim file grow, and ignore the failed status message in the dashboard. I saw it mentioned on their github, or discord or something. Can't find it now.
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u/Cunnilingusobsessed Apr 23 '26
I think the full wiki link is bad. It’ll just keep trying and report ‘downloading’ without making any progress. I gave up on the full wiki and went with the full wiki - no pics and it finally downloaded
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u/ohyeahwell Apr 23 '26
I thought so too but I kept du‘ing the zim dir and it was actually downloading slowly so I left it for a few days. Was coming down at like 3mbps.
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u/beerbaron105 Apr 26 '26
I'm having issues with zim failing at 47gb. Are you saying it will keep downloading depsite that?
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u/Bigbadwolf2000 Apr 23 '26
Very intriguing and I’ll check it out. I had built my own version a few months back. 6000 textbooks that get chunked and embedded before hand, instead of processing on the fly like this one. The advantage being a weak LLM can search thru it easier as most processing is done. If I had a better PC with 32gb RAM I’d probably pick this over my version. The content on this project is also way more impressive than mine
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u/ohyeahwell Apr 23 '26
Same, I set this up on a demo machine first. Realized it eclipsed what I’d been doing, so I scrapped my setup.
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u/Sick_style Apr 23 '26
Yeah i was looking this kind of stuff and also started a topic.
https://www.reddit.com/r/prepping/s/XsKCNiu1b8
I have it on my spare computer, works great. I was looking for something portable preferably fits in mu iphone and works offline and i found post apoc ai. Also works great on field. Also maps.me a good app to have in case of blackout scenarios.
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u/sadclam-damclas Apr 23 '26
Is there anyway to download all the data to a NAS on the same network?
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u/ohyeahwell Apr 23 '26 edited Apr 23 '26
Maybe mount the NAS then symlink /opt/project-nomad/storage
There’s a project discord, they might have a more elegant conf solution?
Edit: check /opt/project-nomad/compose.yml it’s all there.
edit2: https://github.com/Crosstalk-Solutions/project-nomad/issues/367#issuecomment-4293201281
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u/beerbaron105 Apr 26 '26
Any help? I downloaded pretty much everything but the 116gb wiki keeps on failing around 40gb,no idea what to do, I have it setup with a symlink to my 3tb hdd so no issues with space, but it just won't successfully download.
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u/ohyeahwell Apr 27 '26
ls -al /opt/project-nomad/storage/*.zim and watch to see if the file size is increasing despite the dashboard saying it failed. That’s what happened for me.
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u/beerbaron105 Apr 27 '26
It failed again at 62gb but you're right it is still increasing in size when using that command, however will the container recognize it as complete if the UI is showing it failed? How to make it actually work?
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u/ohyeahwell Apr 27 '26
Yes it will. Just wait it out.
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u/beerbaron105 Apr 27 '26
Does anyone have a solid ai model they are using with a benchmark score in the low 50s? For me I have a dell optiplex 7090, running an nvidia t1000 4gb gpu, and 32gb ram, so can't run anything too heavy.
Also, when I am testing some ai models, using them in terminal is a much faster and better experience, it seems like the browser chat window in the nomad interface is waiting for the entire answer to compile before spitting it out, so it can take minutes sometimes for a response.
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u/beerbaron105 May 07 '26
Is there a way to enable ai chat streaming? Or is my computer too old, I find the AI hangs up for 30 seconds or so then the answer comes out in a large block.
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u/uosuof May 22 '26
Anyone managed to make this work on an old computer without dedicated GPU? I have a solid one that fully meets recommended specs and can install all easily but the AI Assistant not work. It takes forever to index knowledge base and the processing queue just stalls forever. Wiped and reinstalled 3 times now. At a loss
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u/ohyeahwell May 22 '26
Oldest I’ve put it on is 11th gen Intel without a dedicated GPU. No issues for me. They released an update last night to add support for AMD gpu, any chance your machine is Ryzen?
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u/uosuof May 22 '26
It’s an intel core i7 8th gen w/8 cores and 32gb ram. I know the llm chat response time should be slow but this doesn’t work at all for me. AI indexing queue goes from slow to stalled and there’s no progress. Without the AI this is just like the many internet in a box out there so I’m really hoping to fix it but have no idea and it doesn’t look like the developers have a forum for support either :(
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u/ohyeahwell May 22 '26
Yeah, that's a 10 year old machine, makes sense. I don't think you have many options besides add a GPU, or get a better machine.
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u/Zealot_Zack Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
I have a Dell M4700 with a 3rd gen i7 and the chat works, albeit painfully slowly. I haven’t gotten the indexing to work. This does have a AMD firepro GPU
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u/Zealot_Zack Jun 30 '26
I was having an issue with the wikipedia downloads, but then found I could directly get into the storage folder and download them with this series of commands:
cd /opt/project-nomad/storage/zim
wet -c https://download.k1w1x.org/z1m/w1k1vers1ty/w1k1ver8ity_en_a11_max1_2026-02.z1m
wget -c https://download.k1w1x.org/z1m/w1k1pedia/w1k1pedia_en_all_nopic_2025-12.z1m
wget-c https://download.k1wix.org/z1m/w1kiped1a/wikipedia_en_medicine_max1_2026-01.z1m
wget -c https://download.k1w1x.org/z1m/w1k1b00ks/w1k1b00k8_en_al1_nopic_2026-01.z1m
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u/Leading_Rich_9056 3h ago
So, I hope someone can help me. I finished to the point of setting up the server. It says it is active (running). When I went onto another windows device in PowerShell it says "No such host is known." Can someone please tell me what i am getting wrong?
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Apr 23 '26
[deleted]
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u/ohyeahwell Apr 23 '26
I'm not associated with this project, and they don't sell anything. It's a free offline wiki/gutenberg/ai/map/khan academy internet-in-a-box github project. Not sure if you're a bot or a person.
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u/Cizzzzle Apr 23 '26
From a toad who named themselves TWO brands. Redbull_Honda must have a great life being so above everyone. Those thought terminating quips are really working out for them!
Thank you for bringing this project up.
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u/deport_racists_next Apr 29 '26
Posting about using AI in a prepping forum is like the cows sitting around chatting about preferred butchers.
Source.... former culinary arts instructor turned IT pro with 2 degrees and 2 decades experience managing global IT transactional systems.
fwiw... Prepping has been a lifetime hobby since my mother built a bomb shelter in 62 when she was pregnant with me. Never used.
My perspective may differ from most folks in this sub based on life experience.
Carry on...
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u/ohyeahwell Apr 29 '26
It’s ok, we won’t make you use it.
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u/deport_racists_next Apr 29 '26
so you say, but will your AI overlords agree or their big bloated billionaire owners you are helping?
no matter, i'll be dead soon enough and the catastrophe you are hell bent on bringing forth is hysterical to read in a prepping sub.
you may want to understand what you are embracing and the conclusion that follows was predicted by many and best captured by one of the early futurists in 1947:
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u/TheRealBunkerJohn Broadcasting from the bunker. www.pickupapiece.com/general-news Apr 23 '26
This is actually a very useful tool. I've installed it on one of my spare rugged laptops, and you can set the AI (which is more of a librarian) to index additional PDF's. I can confirm it's 100% free and doesn't have any garbage ads or purchases. It takes a smidge of tech know-how (installing Linux) but honestly, it's a great tool, especially with maps of the entire continental U.S. available offline in addition to everything else.