🌿 Grounded: TouchGrass AI
Built with Open-Weights Gemma 3 for the "Touch Grass" Challenge
Most modern software is engineered to maximize dwell time—infinite scrolls, algorithmic feeds, and push notifications designed to keep your eyes locked to a glass screen.
I built Grounded for the exact opposite. Its guiding design metric is:
Screen Time ≤ 45 Seconds. Nature Time ≥ 45 Minutes.
🍃 What Grounded Does
Grounded is an air-gapped, zero-signal nature companion designed to get you off the screen and into the real world:
- ⚡ 30-Second Field Dispatcher: Select your available window (15m to 90m) and intent (Foliage Run, Mindful Forest Walk, Birding Stroll, or Homestead Soil Work). Local Gemma 3 crafts a concise mission card with 1 physical task, 1 auditory mindfulness anchor, and an urgent prompt to lock your device and step outside.
- 🐦 Zero-Signal Bioacoustic Bird Call ID: Record directly from your microphone or upload audio. A local NumPy/SciPy FFT engine calculates peak dominant frequencies and generates a live spectrogram, while Gemma 3 identifies species candidates, visual field marks, and flocking behavior with zero internet required.
- 🌱 Frost Date & Soil Garden Action Engine: Computes exact days until first fall frost for your hardiness zone with immediate action items for planting garlic cloves, cover crops, and overwintering greens.
- 🏃 Foliage & Run Club Route Synthesizer: Plots scenic autumn loops with canopy ratings and exports standard GPX files directly to Garmin, Apple Watch, or Strava—allowing you to leave your phone at home entirely.
- ☀️ Sunlight & Night-Vision Modes: Features high-contrast black-on-white mode for direct outdoor sunlight and deep crimson red mode for night owling and stargazing.
💡 Why Open-Source AI is What Makes This Work
Proprietary cloud APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, cloud-hosted LLMs) fail fundamentally in the outdoors for four reasons:
- Dead Zones in the Wilderness: The best trails, ridges, and old-growth canopies have zero cellular reception. Grounded runs Google's open-weights Gemma 3:4b locally via Ollama on my laptop's GPU (RTX 3060 CUDA). It works just as fast on airplane mode 15 miles into a state park as it does on fiber.
- Radical Foraging & Trail Privacy: Foragers and naturalists protect their secret mushroom patches and raptor nests. In Grounded, observations live in an encrypted local SQLite database. Zero corporate telemetry, zero ad tracking.
- Anti-Dwell Time: Commercial chatbots optimize for conversational engagement. Because I control the open model prompt, I instructed Gemma 3 to be radically terse: give the user their mission in 30 words and order them to shut the laptop.
- $0.00 Forever: No API meters, credit cards, or subscription tiers. Nature intelligence belongs in the public commons.
🌲 Field Test: Taking It Outside!
We took Grounded into a local woodland park on an overcast autumn afternoon with Wi-Fi disabled:
- The Dispatch: Generated a 45-minute "Autumn Foliage Trail Run". Gemma 3 dispatched our mission in 2.1 seconds: collect 5 fallen acorns and pause at minute 20 for 60 seconds of silent auditory anchoring.
- The Route: Downloaded the 5.0 km loop GPX to our watch and shut the laptop lid.
- The Sighting: Paused at the 2.2 km mark near white pines and captured a 2.5s two-tone whistle. Local FFT and Gemma 3 identified the Black-capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus) at 3450 Hz with 93% confidence within 1.2s.
- Total Screen Time: Under 45 seconds. Total outdoor time: 48 minutes of trail running, crisp air, and muddy shoes.
Check out the repo, run it locally, and go touch grass! 🍂
GitHub Repo:https://github.com/SripadaError101/grounded-touchgrass
Top comments (0)