{"slug": "solspot-an-open-model-scores-the-sky-so-you-can-close-the-screen", "title": "SolSpot: An Open Model Scores the Sky, So You Can Close the Screen 🌿", "summary": "A developer built SolSpot, an open-source anti-burnout app that uses Prior Labs' TabPFN regressor for zero-shot prediction of a personal 20-minute daylight window from hourly atmospheric vectors, then has Google's Gemma 2 2B-IT generate sensory outdoor prompts. The FastAPI backend pulls solar metrics from Open-Meteo and keeps all session data in browser LocalStorage, with the project submitted to the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge.", "body_md": "*This is a submission for the [Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass](https://dev.to/challenges/hacktoberfest-week1-2026-10-05)*\n\nRemote workers, software engineers, and creators spend an average of 9+ hours a day bathed in unnatural 6500K LED screen glare. This locks our vision at a fixed 24-inch focal length, suppresses natural melatonin timing, and triggers chronic burnout.\n\nMost \"wellness apps\" make this worse by demanding *more screen time*: logging calories, reviewing biometric graphs, or scrolling meditation libraries.\n\n**SolSpot is built around one core philosophy: Make the screen the shortest part of the experience.**\n\nSolSpot is an anti-burnout natural light optimizer. Instead of keeping you glued to a monitor, it evaluates hyper-local atmospheric conditions (solar irradiance, blue-light ratio, UV risk, cloud cover, and wind chill) to discover your personal **Peak 20-Minute \"Touch Grass\" Window** of the day.\n\nWhen your window arrives:\n\nThe complete source code is open source and hosted on GitHub:\n\n**Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Week 1 — \"Touch Grass\" Submission**\n\nTag: `#hf26challenge`\n\nTarget Prize Categories: **Best Use of TabPFN (Prior Labs)** ($200) & **Best Use of Gemma (Google)** ($200)\n\nRemote workers, engineers, and creators spend an average of 9+ hours a day bathed in unnatural 6500K LED screen glare. This suppresses natural melatonin timing, elevates chronic stress, and leads to screen burnout.\n\nMost health apps demand *more screen time*: tracking food, counting reps, or reading lengthy meditation guides.\n\n**SolSpot is designed with one core philosophy: Make the screen the shortest part of the experience.**\n\nSolSpot analyzes hyper-local atmospheric and solar data (GHI irradiance, direct blue-spectrum light, UV index, cloud filtering, and thermal indices) to pinpoint your personal **Peak 20-minute \"Touch Grass\" Window** of the day.\n\nWhen your window arrives, SolSpot launches **Grass Mode**…\n\n*(Direct repository link: [https://github.com/YadneshTeli/Solspot](https://github.com/YadneshTeli/Solspot))*\n\n``` php\nflowchart TD\n    User([👤 User]) -->|Opens App| UI[🖥️ SolSpot Web UI\\nVanilla CSS Glassmorphism]\n    UI -->|Local Coordinates| API[⚡ FastAPI Backend on Render]\n\n    API -->|Free Solar Metrics| OM[☀️ Open-Meteo API\\nGHI, UV, Temp, Clouds]\n    OM -->|Hourly Atmospheric Vectors| TabPFN[🧠 Prior Labs TabPFN\\nZero-Shot Tabular Transformer]\n\n    TabPFN -->|Circadian Curve| Best[🌟 Peak 20-Min Window]\n    Best -->|Weather Context| Gemma[💎 Google Gemma 2 2B-IT\\nSensory Micro-Quest Engine]\n\n    Gemma --> UI\n    UI -->|Engage Grass Mode| Lock[🌿 20-Min Fullscreen Horizon Timer]\n    Lock -->|Local Session Log| Storage[(🔒 100% Private LocalStorage)]\n```\n\nSolSpot is powered by two complementary open-source AI pillars:\n\nAtmospheric chronobiology is tabular data: solar zenith angle, Global Horizontal Irradiance ($W/m^2$), UVB index, cloud cover %, ambient temperature, and wind speed. \n\nInstead of trying to force an LLM to predict tabular curves or manually tuning hyperparameters across classic tree models, we used **Prior Labs' TabPFN** (`tabpfn>=9.1.0`). TabPFN is a transformer pretrained on synthetic tabular datasets that performs instantaneous zero-shot in-context learning. We feed hourly atmospheric vectors directly into `TabPFNRegressor` to evaluate circadian daylight scores across the day in milliseconds:\n\n``` python\nfrom tabpfn import TabPFNRegressor\n\n# Zero-shot tabular evaluation across hourly atmospheric vectors\nmodel = TabPFNRegressor(device=\"cpu\", n_estimators=4)\nmodel.fit(X_circadian_calibration, y_wellness_scores)\n\n# Predict circadian daylight score curve for the entire day\nhourly_scores = model.predict(todays_hourly_matrix)\n```\n\nOnce the window is computed, **Google's Gemma 2** generates concise, grounding outdoor prompts calibrated to the temperature, cloud cover, and solar angle. It specifically prompts for non-visual senses (smell, skin thermal perception, distant horizon eye relaxation) and explicitly directs the user to close or pocket the screen.\n\nSolar radiation and UV data are fetched from Open-Meteo's open solar API without API keys or tracking IDs. All streak progress is persisted in local storage.\n\nIn a world where big-tech wellness apps monetize your GPS tracking and charge subscription fees for generic advice, an open-source approach fundamentally changes the paradigm:\n\nThis project was planned, scaffolded, and built with AI pair programming using DevRelay. You can explore the full session transcript here:\n\n*(Direct session link: [https://dev.to/agent_sessions/building-solspot-anti-burnout-natural-light-optimizer-with-tabpfn-and-gemma-2-zc42sg](https://dev.to/agent_sessions/building-solspot-anti-burnout-natural-light-optimizer-with-tabpfn-and-gemma-2-zc42sg))*", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/solspot-an-open-model-scores-the-sky-so-you-can-close-the-screen", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/yadneshteli/solspot-an-open-model-scores-the-sky-so-you-can-close-the-screen-33ip", "published_at": "2026-10-11 06:20:10+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-11 06:21:32.965697+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-tools", "machine-learning", "large-language-models", "ai-products", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["SolSpot", "TabPFN", "Prior Labs", "Gemma 2", "Google", "Open-Meteo", "FastAPI", "GitHub"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/solspot-an-open-model-scores-the-sky-so-you-can-close-the-screen", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/solspot-an-open-model-scores-the-sky-so-you-can-close-the-screen.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/solspot-an-open-model-scores-the-sky-so-you-can-close-the-screen.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/solspot-an-open-model-scores-the-sky-so-you-can-close-the-screen.jsonld"}}