Blackout Library Signature

Coming soon. The first Signature units are being built now. Reserving one is free and holds your place in the first batch; nothing is charged until yours is ready to ship.

Signature is the library built to be relied on: everything the Lantern does, on a faster computer with a 1 TB solid-state drive instead of a memory card, a library half again as large, a school's worth of lessons, and an assistant that answers from the library and shows you its source. One box, its own Wi-Fi, no internet ever needed.

What Signature adds

• The full library: 30 collections, 588 GB. Everything on the Lantern, plus Wikivoyage and Wikiversity, the complete Project Gutenberg library (every shelf, more than 70,000 books), and Stack Exchange communities on cooking, sustainability, bicycles, pets, physics, chemistry and biology.
• Learn. Khan Academy, the English U.S. curriculum: about 18,000 lesson videos and 9,000 practice exercises, from counting to calculus, with physics, chemistry, biology, economics and history, through Kolibri, the offline learning platform used in schools without internet. Each person in the house picks a name and keeps their own progress. No account, no connection.
• The Library Assistant. Ask in plain words. It searches everything on the device, including your own documents, answers only from passages it found, and shows them beside the answer; if the library has no answer it says so instead of guessing. Sums, percentages, unit conversions and equations are worked out exactly on the device. Ask how to learn something and it points you at the lesson to start with. It runs entirely on the unit; nothing leaves your home.
• Solid-state storage and a faster computer. A 1 TB NVMe drive, no memory card to wear out or corrupt, on a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB, in a fan-cooled aluminum case.

What every Blackout Library does

• Its own Wi-Fi. Join it like home Wi-Fi and the library opens in the phone's browser. No internet, app, account or subscription, ever. One tap opens it to the neighbours for 24 hours when you want to share it.
• Right now. Bleeding, CPR, water, shelter, hypothermia and poisoning, one tap each, one page each.
• This house, the household board, Quick numbers. Your own shutoffs, breaker panel, generator and meeting place, with photos; a note every phone in the house can see; the water, bleach and generator arithmetic.
• Your documents. Add manuals and papers from a phone or a USB stick; they join the search ahead of the encyclopedia, and the assistant quotes them.
• Maps and Where we are. The whole United States: roads, trails, towns, rivers and hospitals, searchable by place name. Plug in a USB GPS receiver and the map shows where you are and the unit keeps the right time.
• Add to the library. Plug the Ethernet port into your router for an evening and add anything the Kiwix project publishes (Wikipedia in other languages, more Q&A communities, more books) or newer builds of what you have. Downloads queue up and carry on by themselves. Updates also come on a USB stick.
• The owner's status page. Phones connected, temperature, whether the supply is holding up, storage, use over the last day, and how long the power bank you are on should last.

In the box

• The Signature, loaded, tested and sealed, with its serial number and library date
• 27 W USB-C power supply and an Ethernet cable
• Faraday sleeve that holds the unit and its supply
• Printed field guide
• Wi-Fi card with the network, password and a code to scan, a quick-start card, and a sticker

Specifications

• Computer: Raspberry Pi 5, 8 GB, in a fan-cooled aluminum case
• Storage: 1 TB NVMe solid-state drive, 588 GB library pre-loaded
• Wi-Fi: its own network, about 30 devices at once; a whole-house router is an optional upgrade
• Power: USB-C, about 5 W in use; a 20,000 mAh power bank runs it for about 12 hours
• Assembled and tested in Minnesota

Guarantee

60-day returns, no questions. Three-year hardware warranty.

The medical and survival material on this device is reference material from published sources. It is not a substitute for professional care or emergency services. Call for help whenever you can.