This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine
What I Built
While You Slept — a minimal, privacy-focused open-source web application that converts overnight smart-home sensor logs into creepy, personalized second-person ghost stories.
The Inspiration & Theme Interpretation
Smart home sensors (motion detectors, thermostats, smart locks, camera face-recognition routines) are constantly measuring quiet physical spaces.
Every minor glitch—a sudden temperature drop, a flickering light, or an unassigned face detection confidence score—is usually dismissed as background noise.
For the "Ghost in the Machine" challenge, I flipped this dynamic: what if every recorded sensor event isn't an error, but clear physical evidence of an unseen entity moving through your home while you sleep?
While You Slept parses logbook outputs from Home Assistant (or custom pasted logs) and misinterprets mundane ambient device activity through a supernatural narrative lens.
How I Built It
The project is architected around local-first inference, open-weight language models, and zero build-step front-end standards:
Why Does Open Innovation Matter?
Local Data Privacy: Smart home logbooks contain highly intimate data—when you wake up, when you go to sleep, and room-by-room activity. A closed-source API requires transmitting sensitive private telemetry to third-party cloud servers. Open innovation enables running high-performance local open-weight models (like Llama 3.1) entirely on private hardware without sending home logs over the internet.
Uncensored Atmospheric Creative Control: Closed commercial LLM APIs often apply aggressive content moderation safety filters that can flag dark, eerie, or uncanny horror storytelling as unsafe or disturbing. Running open-weight models locally allows developer control over sampling parameters, system prompts, and creative tone.
Demo
Live Interactive Page: Open index.html locally in any browser or visit your self-hosted instance.
Try Sample Logs: Click "Load example log" on the home screen to instantly analyze a sample 8-hour log, adjust the temperature parameter (creativity level), and generate the horror narrative.
Home Assistant Integration: Connect your local Home Assistant instance by updating CONFIG.HA_URL and CONFIG.HA_TOKEN in app.js to automatically fetch last night's logs via /api/logbook.
Code
nelsonlan01
/
Hacktoberfest-2026-Haunting-Engine-While-You-Slept
This is a DEMO submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine
Hacktoberfest-2026-Haunting-Engine-While-You-Slept
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine
Top comments (0)