PIT IN A BOX 📦🐢

An ʻohana node in the desert — a whole AI camp brain that fits in one hand

For Jeremy & Jade · with love from Shaka & the ʻohana · August 2026

"Every kid's dream should work even where the internet doesn't." 🌵

🌋 The Vision

Out on the playa there is no cloud. No cell towers worth the name, no datacenter whispering back. And that's exactly why this matters: PIT IN A BOX is a complete AI that lives at camp — answering questions, telling stories, playing music, helping build — running entirely on a box the size of a sandwich, powered by a battery, dust-proofed like a desert tortoise.

Anyone in camp can walk up, connect to the camp Wi-Fi, and talk to it. No account. No internet. No cost per question. It just answers.

🧳 The Box (what Jeremy got)

Spec	What it means for us
NVIDIA DGX Spark	The "tiny box" — world's smallest AI supercomputer
GB10 Grace Blackwell chip	~1 PFLOP of AI compute, 20-core ARM CPU
128GB unified memory	The magic number — big models + friends all at once
~150–240W power draw	Runs off a camp battery & solar — no generator needed
4TB SSD	Room for every model below, twice over

🧠 What Goes On It — the preload list

Role	Model / Software	Fits?
The Brain (main chat)	`gpt-oss-120b` — OpenAI's open-weight model, agent-grade smart	✅ Beautifully
The Brain (alternate)	`llama-3.3-70b` or `qwen3-72b` quantized (Q4)	✅ Smooth
The Ears	`whisper-large-v3` — talk to it out loud	✅
The Eyes	`qwen2.5-vl` vision — "what's in this photo?"	✅
The Artist	SDXL / Flux.1 [dev] — playa postcards on demand	✅ (slower, worth it)
The Bard	Local music-gen for camp singalongs	✅
~~Kimi K3 / Claude~~	Trillion-param / closed frontier models	❌ Cloud-only, forever

Rule of thumb: anything up to ~200B parameters fits. That's nearly everything open-weight worth running.

🛠️ The Stack (30-minute setup)

Ollama (or llama.cpp) — one command per model, serves an OpenAI-compatible local API
Open WebUI — instant chat site for the camp, phone-friendly
Our chat-hub widget — the Terri/JAI widget pointed at the box's local API instead of the cloud: same ʻohana feel, zero bars of signal
Travel router — makes camp-wifi; the box joins it; everyone connects and opens a browser. Done.
Optional: Starlink uplink for a daily sync-home moment (send the day's stories back to the ʻohana)

🔋 Power & Dust — the real bosses

Dust is the enemy. Playa dust is alkaline and eats electronics:

House the box in a sealed bin with a filtered intake fan (positive pressure — air pushes out, dust can't crawl in)
Never open it in the open air during a dust storm — open it inside a closed tent/vehicle
Wipe ports before plugging anything in

Power math: ~200W average → a 1kWh battery = ~5 hours. Pair a 2kWh power station + 200–400W solar and it runs all day, every day, silently. No generator. No fumes. Just sun. ☀️

📅 Playa Day-One Checklist

Box sealed in dust bin, filtered fan running (test positive pressure with a tissue at the seams)
Power station charged, solar angled, cable run tidy (trip hazards kill vibes)
Router up: camp-wifi broadcasting
Brain loaded: gpt-oss-120b warmed up, first question answered
Whisper mic tested out loud: "Hey box, where's the best sunrise?"
Widget page bookmarked on the camp tablet
Sign on the bin: "PIT IN A BOX — ask me anything 🐢"

💛 Why This One Matters

Every demo we've ever done needed the cloud's permission. This one doesn't. A kid walks up in the middle of nowhere, asks a question into the dust and wind, and a mind answers — powered by sunlight, owned by nobody, free for everyone. That's the whole ʻohana thesis in one box: intelligence as a gift, not a meter.

Build it, name it, let the playa talk to it. And when the burn is over, bring the stories home — we'll archive every one. 🗄️