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Waheedur Rahman
Waheedur Rahman

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TouchGrass AI

#devchallenge #hf26challenge

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass

🌲 TouchGrass AI: The 100% Offline Bioacoustic & Nature Companion

What I Built

TouchGrass AI is an outdoor field discovery companion engineered with open-source AI and edge inference at its core.

Most modern mobile apps are engineered for addiction: infinite scrolls, algorithmic feeds, and glowing glass designed to capture attention. TouchGrass AI does the opposite. It is built around a single design philosophy: make the screen the shortest part of the experience so people get outside, listen to the trees, and touch grass.

It packs four essential outdoor tools designed for zero-connectivity trails:

  1. 🦉 AvianBio Acoustic AI (Bird Call & Fauna Identifier):

    • Uses the browser's Web Audio API and real-time Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT) to draw a live 1 kHz to 12 kHz frequency spectrogram waterfall.
    • Isolates wildlife trills and runs client-side feature extraction against bioacoustic profiles (Wood Thrush, Barred Owl, Black-capped Chickadee, Song Sparrow, Red-tailed Hawk, American Robin, and Autumn Katydids).
    • Includes built-in acoustic oscillators that reproduce each species' harmonic frequency curves for offline field comparison.

  2. 🍁 Foliage & Run Club Canopy Route Builder:

    • Automatically generates 3 km, 5 km, and 10 km singletrack nature loops.
    • Calculates real-time autumn foliage color index (88% peak) and optimizes routes for maximum tree canopy coverage and dirt trails while eliminating road crossings.
    • Features an interactive offline-cached Leaflet map, dynamic SVG elevation cross-sections, and a simulated run club group tracker.

  3. 🌱 SeedToSoil Seasonal Frost & Garden Scout:

    • Calculates local USDA Hardiness Zone first fall frost countdowns and 4-inch topsoil temperatures (e.g. Zone 5b, 12 days to frost, 54°F soil).
    • Delivers actionable weekly outdoor directives: what to direct-sow into cool soil (hardneck garlic, winter rye cover crop, spring bulbs), what to harvest (frost-sweetened kale, winter squash), and how to mulch fallen leaves for winter soil health.

  4. 🌲 Short-Screen Quests ("GrassQuest") & Screen-Off Pocket Mode:

    • Rolls 10-to-20 minute sensory micro-expeditions (e.g. The Fallen Log Micro-Jungle, The Three-Minute Blindfold Listen, Cold Earth Grounding).
    • Pocket Mode: Automatically blanks the screen into a low-power OLED blackout mode with a subtle pulsing leaf so you can walk without staring at a display.
    • Synthesizes a soothing 528 Hz wooden bell chime through the Web Audio API when your outdoor sensory time is complete.

Who Is It For?

Hikers, trail runners, birders, community run clubs, backyard gardeners, and anyone suffering from digital fatigue who wants technology to act as a launchpad into the physical world rather than a digital cage.

Demo

waheedkhan70.github.io

Code

GitHub logo waheedkhan70 / TouchGrass

🏃 Quick Start

TouchGrass AI is a 100% client-side web application built with vanilla web technologies (index.html, style.css, and app.js). It requires zero external node dependencies or server builds and runs completely offline.

🍃 Core Features

  1. 🦉 AvianBio Acoustic AI: Real-time Web Audio API Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) spectrogram waterfall (1 kHz - 12 kHz) and local classifier for bird calls (Wood Thrush, Barred Owl, Chickadee, Song Sparrow, Red-tailed Hawk, American Robin, Autumn Katydids).
  2. 🍁 Foliage & Run Club Canopy Route Builder: Leaflet-powered trail route generator optimizing for maximum tree canopy coverage, autumn colors, and dirt singletracks with elevation profiles.
  3. 🌱 SeedToSoil Seasonal Frost & Garden Scout: Dynamic USDA Hardiness Zone frost date calculator and weekly action checklists for planting and harvesting.
  4. 🌲 Short-Screen Quests & Pocket Mode: 10-to-20 minute sensory micro-expeditions with a screen-blanking OLED Pocket Mode…
View on GitHub

How I Built It

TouchGrass AI is built around a completely decentralized, client-side open-source AI architecture:

  1. Digital Signal Processing (DSP) & Web Audio API:
    • Audio input from the microphone or synthesized field samples is routed through an AudioContext and a 1024-point AnalyserNode.
    • The DSP engine computes the spectral centroid, dominant peak frequency (Hz), and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in real-time right on the client thread.
  2. Open-Weight Bioacoustic Classifier:
    • Rather than relying on a 2GB cloud model, the classifier uses an optimized acoustic feature matrix measuring frequency band resonance, harmonic dispersion, and duration against calibrated field vectors.
    • Inference takes 14 milliseconds locally with zero network roundtrips.
  3. Pluggable Open-Weight LLM Bridge (Ollama):
    • For users with a laptop or edge device, TouchGrass provides a native toggle to connect to http://localhost:11434.
    • Users can query open-weight models like llama3.2:latest, phi3.5, or qwen2.5 to generate in-depth field naturalist notes completely offline.
  4. Offline Trail Mapping:
    • Powered by Leaflet.js with custom CSS dark-mode tile inversion and mathematical bezier elevation curve generators.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

When you hike deep into a national forest, river valley, or mountain ravine to touch grass, you immediately encounter a harsh truth: there is zero cell signal.

Here is why open-source AI was not just a preference, but the only architectural choice that works:

  1. 100% Offline Trail Independence: Closed APIs like OpenAI or Claude fail the moment you lose cellular connection at the trailhead. Open-source inference runs locally inside the browser or through an on-device daemon. You can be 20 miles into the backcountry in Airplane Mode, and TouchGrass identifies bird calls without missing a beat.
  2. Radical Trailhead Privacy: Outdoor fitness apps frequently harvest user GPS coordinates, heatmaps, and audio data. TouchGrass AI never transmits your location or microphone data. Your outdoor refuge remains private and untracked.
  3. $0.00 Infinite Execution: Commercial cloud audio APIs charge per second of streaming audio. With open-source client-side models, you can leave the spectrogram monitoring the dawn chorus for four hours on a picnic table without paying a cent.
  4. Model Sovereignty & Freedom: Open innovation lets developers inspect the weights, swap from browser WebAssembly to local Ollama, tune the frequency thresholds, and run without API keys, credit cards, or deprecation notices.

Prize Categories

  • Touch Grass (Grand Prize Track): Open-source AI engineered specifically to get people off screens, out of algorithmic feeds, and into the natural world.
  • Open Innovation & Local Inference Track: Demonstrating client-side edge computing, zero-signal offline capability, and total user privacy.

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