Phase 01 Scope and Non-Goals

Status: Draft
Version: 0.2
Detailed plan: Flashable Pi-hole Image POC

Scope Statement

Phase 01 proves that Sovereign can deliver a useful home appliance as one flashable Raspberry Pi image. A user writes the image, boots a Raspberry Pi 5, and receives an operational Pi-hole service at:

http://sovereign.local/dns/admin/

The post-POC Console Foundation adds a read-only platform entry point at http://sovereign.local/, which redirects to /console/. Pi-hole remains an independent service under /dns/*.

The phase validates distribution and appliance foundations, not the AI-native platform.

Included

• Raspberry Pi 5 with 16 GB RAM as the sole target.
• Raspberry Pi OS Lite 64-bit base.
• One reproducible compressed disk image.
• Docker Engine and Compose deployment boundary.
• Official Pi-hole ARM64 container pinned by immutable digest.
• Pi-hole artifact embedded for offline first boot.
• Persistent Pi-hole configuration and data.
• Unique device identity and Pi-hole credential generated on first boot.
• Nginx routing Pi-hole under /dns/*.
• Avahi/mDNS providing sovereign.local.
• Direct-IP fallback.
• Automatic startup and idempotent first-boot initialization.
• DNS, HTTP, reboot, interruption, persistence, resource, and release tests.
• Checksums, release metadata, flashing instructions, router DNS instructions, and known limitations.

Explicit Non-Goals

• General-purpose administration dashboard or mutating management API. The bounded, read-only Console health surface is tracked separately in the Console Foundation plan.
• Local or remote LLM, AI chat, capability registry, or Pi-hole AI adapter.
• Voice or wake-word support.
• Home Assistant, documents, calendar, or other service integrations.
• A general plugin lifecycle or marketplace.
• Public internet exposure or remote administration.
• Automatic router configuration.
• Pi-hole DHCP enabled by default.
• Multi-user support.
• Broad hardware, OS, SD/USB/NVMe, or architecture support without testing.
• Production-grade automatic update, rollback, or support guarantees.
• Replacing Raspberry Pi OS or creating a new Linux distribution from scratch.

Required External User Action

Pi-hole will be operational immediately after first boot, but network-wide filtering requires the user to configure a router or individual devices to use the Raspberry Pi's stable IP address as DNS. The image must not attempt to modify unknown router settings or enable a competing DHCP server automatically.

Change Control

An item may enter Phase 01 only when it is required to produce, boot, access, secure, diagnose, or verify the Pi-hole appliance image. All AI and broader platform work remains in the master-plan backlog until this phase meets its exit criteria.