AeroGemma: Checking If You Can Actually Touch Grass Today 🌿
I spend most of my day in front of a screen, so when the Touch Grass challenge came up, I thought it fit me pretty well. But I also noticed a problem. Going outside isn't always a good idea. If the air is full of PM2.5, ozone and smog, a run or a walk can do more harm than good. I'm from Delhi NCR, so I know this one personally.
So I built AeroGemma, a web app that tells you whether it's safe to go outside right now. It pulls live air quality data and then uses Google's Gemma model (gemma-4-26b-a4b-it) to turn the numbers into advice a normal person can follow.
Demo
GitHub Repo: IshlokDwivedi-coder/AQI_System
Run it locally: node server.js, or just open index.html in your browser.
What it does
🌿 "Can I Touch Grass Today?" verdict: a color gauge and a badge that tell you if the air is okay for going out.
🏃 Activity checker: separate status for Running & Cardio, Gardening, Dog Walking & Hikes, and Kids' Playgrounds.
🤖 Gemma Outdoor Advisor: Gemma reads the pollutant values and gives you simple advice on what to do.
📍 Search any city: use GPS in one click or search by city name. It uses Open-Meteo, so there's no API key or rate limit to worry about.
🛡️ Offline mode: if there's no internet, a built-in rule engine still gives you a basic answer.
It also breaks down 6 pollutants (PM2.5, PM10, O3, NO2, SO2, CO) and compares them against WHO guideline values.
Code
The whole project is open source:
🌿 AeroGemma — Touch Grass with AI-Powered Air Quality
Submission for Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Week 1 ("Touch Grass")
Prize Category Track: 🏆 Best Use of Gemma (Google's Open-Weight Model)
Live GitHub Repo: IshlokDwivedi-coder/AQI_System
Author: Ishlok Dwivedi (@ishlokdwivedicoder)
📖 Overview
The theme of this week's Hacktoberfest challenge is Touch Grass: build something with open-source AI at its core that gets people away from screens and out into the real world.
While spending time in nature (hiking, running, gardening, birding) is vital for physical and mental health, poor air quality (elevated PM2.5, ground-level ozone, and chemical smog) can turn a refreshing outdoor workout into a health hazard—especially for children, older adults, and those with respiratory conditions.
AeroGemma solves this dilemma. It is a sleek, intuitive, and responsive web application that fetches real-time atmospheric readings from global monitoring stations and pairs them with Google's open-weight Gemma model (gemma-4-26b-a4b-it…
Repo URL: https://github.com/IshlokDwivedi-coder/AQI_System
How I Built It
I kept the stack simple on purpose.
Frontend: plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with no framework. The page theme changes color with the AQI level using CSS variables, and the gauge is an SVG. I also tried a glassmorphism look, which was fun to figure out.
Gemma: I call Gemma through the Google AI Studio API. The tricky part was prompt design. I send it the live values (US AQI, PM2.5, PM10, O3, NO2, temperature and UV index) and ask it for practical health advice. It took a few tries before the answers stopped sounding generic.
Air quality data: Open-Meteo's Air Quality and Weather API, which covers stations worldwide and doesn't need a token.
Offline fallback: if the user has no signal, a simple rule-based engine gives a basic recommendation so the app still does something useful.
Why I Used an Open Model
I picked Gemma instead of a closed API for a few reasons that actually matter for an app like this:
It can work without internet. Hiking trails and national parks often have no signal, and a cloud-only API is useless there. Open weights can run on a laptop or phone.
Privacy. To use a closed API you have to send your location and health details (like asthma) to someone else's servers. With an open model, that data can stay on your device.
No cost, no lock-in. College clubs, run groups and NGOs can build on it without paying per token or worrying that an API will be shut down.
Honestly, I think this is where open models matter most: small, useful tools that don't need a big company behind them.
My Agent Session
I built and deployed this with pair-programming help from DevRelay:
I want to build an Air Quality Index (AQI) website for the Hacktoberfest 'Touch Grass' challenge using Google's open-weight Gemma model, and push it to GitHub.
Great concept! We will build AeroGemma: a real-time AQI dashboard connected to Open-Meteo station data and powered by Google Gemma (gemma-4-26b-a4b-it) to evaluate whether it is safe to touch grass and recommend tailored outdoor activities.
Make sure all code is in AQI_System so I can push it directly to my GitHub repo.
Committed and pushed clean code to https://github.com/IshlokDwivedi-coder/AQI_System with GitHub Secret Scanning compliance.
(Session link: https://dev.to/agent_sessions/building-aerogemma-touch-grass-aqi-advisor-with-google-gemma-pld3yg)
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