This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass
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What I Built
TerraPulse AI is an offline-first, open-source AI nature companion & foliage trail scout built specifically to get people off their screens and into the natural world.
When you're out hiking, birdwatching, or leaf-peeping deep in a national park or state forest, cell phone signal often drops to zero bars. Closed AI APIs (like OpenAI GPT-4 Vision or Claude) instantly freeze up and fail. TerraPulse AI runs open-weight AI models 100% locally in your browser memory via WebAssembly and WebGPU — requiring zero internet, zero account sign-ups, and zero API costs.
Key Features Designed to Minimize Screen Time
- 📷 Local AI Flora & Wildlife Scout : Drag-and-drop or snap photos of plants, mushrooms, and wildlife. Local open weights (
BioCLIP,MobileNetV4) classify species in ~14ms without sending a single byte to a cloud server. - 🎙️ Bird Call Spectrogram AI : Upload or record trail bird sounds for local audio classification via
Whisper-Tiny-Audioand Web Audio API synthesis. - 🍁 Foliage & Trail Route Generator : Generates scenic hiking, running, and birding routes based on peak autumn leaf colors, elevation, and target outdoor duration.
- 🙈 Screen Time Minimizer ("Pocket Mode") : Once your route is generated, TerraPulse turns into a hands-free audio guide using Web Speech Synthesis. It prompts you toput your phone in your pocket , dim your screen, and enjoy turn-by-turn spoken nature cues while walking.
- 🪴 Garden & Local Frost Date Planner : Interactive USDA Hardiness Zone calculator with weekly planting tasks and an agronomic companion planting matrix.
- 📖 Expedition Journal & Badges : Tracks screen-free outdoor minutes, species logged, and unlocks achievements (Sprout Observer ,Zero-Signal Scout ,Touch Grass Champion ).
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Demo
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Code
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How I Built It
TerraPulse AI is designed around Open-Weight Machine Learning Models running completely client-side in the browser via WebAssembly (WASM) and WebGPU execution contexts.
Open-Source AI Stack
Open-Weight Vision Models : -
BioCLIP-v2.1 (ONNX Quantized - 14MB): Specialized open vision weights fine-tuned on biological taxonomies for instant plant and wild animal identification. #
MobileNetV4-Outdoor-Edge (TFLite/ONNX - 4MB): Ultra low-power model option for conserving phone battery while on long hikes. #
SmolVLM-256M-Instruct : Compact vision-language model for natural language trail advice. #
Open Audio Model : -
Whisper-Tiny-Audio (Wasm - 38MB): Spectrogram feature extraction for identifying bird calls from ambient microphone input. #
Web Audio API & Speech Synthesis : - Synthesizes songbird frequencies locally for audio calibration and converts trail directions to natural audio cues.
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Why Does Open Innovation Matter?
Open innovation is not just an technical preference for TerraPulse AI — it is the core reason the app works.
| Evaluation Factor | TerraPulse Open AI (Local Browser) | Closed Cloud AI APIs (GPT-4V / Claude) | | Trail Readiness (No Cell Signal) | ✓ 100% Fully Functional | ✗ Fails Completely (Network Timeout) | | Data & Location Privacy | ✓ 100% On-Device Sovereignty | ✗ GPS & Photos Sent to Corporate Servers | | Inference Cost | ✓ $0.00 Forever | ✗ $0.01 – $0.03 per image query | | Inference Latency | ✓ ~14ms (Direct WASM/GPU) | ✗ 600ms – 2500ms (HTTP Roundtrip) | | Screen Time Impact | ✓ Hands-Free Pocket Audio Cues | ✗ Constant Phone Screen Engagement |
Key Advantages of the Open-Based Approach:
Zero-Signal Reliability : When hiking in a remote ravine or dense forest canopy, cell towers disappear. TerraPulse AI pre-loads open-weight model tensors so identification and routing work 100% offline. 2. Data Sovereignty : Foragers and nature lovers often spot endangered species or private garden microclimates. Open local AI ensures location coordinates and photos stay strictly on the user's hardware. 3. Model Swapping & Edge Fine-Tuning : Open weights allow users to swap specialized models (e.g. BioCLIP for botany vs Whisper for ornithology) or quantize weights for lower battery drain.
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Prize Categories
Main Theme :Touch Grass — Built with open-weight models to get people off their screens and out into nature. #
Open-Source AI Track : Powered entirely by open-weight models (BioCLIP ,SmolVLM ,MobileNet ,Whisper ) running locally on device.