this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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Asklemmy
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Let me preface this by saying that, compared to your average Lemmy user, I am not a technical person. What stuck in my head was removing the radio and comms tech completely - no cell radio, no wifi, no GPS. Literally just make it an average cellphone sized offline tablet, where you're adding stuff only via the USB port or SD card slot.
Assuming this were possible/actually worth it, would probably need custom firmware to actually make it useable anyway. Just taking an off the shelf smartphone and using a custom launcher would likely be the more practical route, but I'd be more interested if it was offline only from a pure hardware perspective.
But I digress - I just thought it was funny to see this when it seriously was the "What if?" that made it hard for me to get to sleep the other day.
You're thinking about it too hard.
Just use a launcher, sometimes called Kiosk mode/launchers, to launch one app. You can disable the other hardware if you want, but it doesn't seem like it really helps you reach your goal.
You could probably pull it off with a Pi Zero, battery pack, and screen if you want to get into it a bit. It's not that hard at all.
Probably - thought about it harder anyway (see: actually read stuff), and the closest you can probably get to what I was thinking about with your average smartphone is disconnecting and terminating all connections to the antennas.
Let's be real, though - if I actually intended to use something like this, it'd for sure be something cobbled together using an SBC like the Pi Zero.
It's not uncommon to just disable hardware you don't intent to use. You don't have to do it mechanically. There's a lot of kiosks around that have a lot more capabilities than they're used for.
If you're looking to do it with a Pi, banana, orange or raspberry, let me know. I've spent way too much time finding the perfect screen to use and case to print. I build a rechargeable handheld device that can pull up all my surveillance cameras and functions as a master remote.