planetai-node

See your place at higher resolution. A small program for a computer in your home, lab or community centre. It connects everything that measures where you stand, from a particle sensor on the wall to a satellite overhead, into one picture sharp enough to act on: what to do about the air, the heat, the sea, the land, today, here. It tells the people there in plain sentences, on Telegram, and passes upward what the models of a bioregion and a planet cannot see from above: what the ground is doing.

Alpha. This is an experiment. Installing a node makes you part of it: things will break, some will surprise you, and what you report decides what gets fixed first. Write to info@fab.city with what broke, what helped, what did not.

curl -fsSL planetai.fab.city/install | bash

Four questions, two minutes, running. Then planetai telegram for the alerts and planetai ui for the dashboard. Walk-through in docs/START_HERE.md.

What it is

Hyperlocal awareness for climate and local challenges, built on distributed design and production. A city is measured today by satellites, by models with 11 km squares, and by a few reference stations; none of them know your kitchen at 3 am, the shade on your street, or which hour to open the windows. A node fills that resolution gap from below, with the sensors people already own, and decides where it stands instead of sending readings away. Community scale first, then city, then region; upward, only summaries, to the Fab City Index and to the models that need ground truth.

What it does

• Connects every scale. Sensors on WiFi (Smart Citizen, AirGradient, PurpleAir), radios over LoRa where there is no WiFi (Meshtastic), public stations nearby, the city's open-data portal, Copernicus atmosphere and ocean models, Earth Engine's view of the land. One schema from the room to the planet.
• Turns awareness into action. Alerts say what is happening, what it means, what to do. Then the node measures whether anything changed: ρ, the share of alerts that led to an action, a number the Index never had.
• Shows the place. A dashboard with the room's number as a sentence, the day as an annotated chart, every source with a note, the sea, the land, the weather. Four views: Now, Network, Set up, Wall.
• Answers questions. A bot on your Telegram, running a small model on your own machine, reads the node and explains it; point it at a bigger model when you have one.
• Keeps the data where it was made. Local database, nightly backups a NAS can collect, an open daily export you decide where to send.
• Grows by folders. Air, heat, coast, land, place (what is around you, from OpenStreetMap, in PostGIS) and open-data packs ship. Water, energy, noise, classroom CO₂, fire smoke are a folder of rules each, written by whoever needs them, for their place.

Node #1 has run in Kuta Selatan, Bali, since 2 September 2026.

Read next

docs/     getting a node running   START_HERE · PLATFORMS · REVIVE_A_LAPTOP · MAC_MINI · UPDATING · STORAGE
          when it goes wrong       TROUBLESHOOTING
          what it can tell you     USE_CASES · sensors · DOMAINS · COVERAGE · PREFILL · GUI
          extending it             PACKS · PACK_IDEAS · DEVELOPING
          radios and reachability  NETWORKING · MESHTASTIC
          the beta review          BETA_TESTER_GUIDE · HANDOFF_beta_review · reviews/
          the earth pack           HANDOFF_earth_pack
          the dashboard's design    HANDOFF_dashboard_violations · design/shots/
          reports and messages     HANDOFF_reports
          the trust pack           HANDOFF_trust
          the ring and the forecast HANDOFF_nearby_forecast
          air, heat, land, coast   HANDOFF_issues · DOMAINS
          the dashboard renderer  HANDOFF_dashboard_renderer · GUI
          three directions, picked HANDOFF_dashboard_directions · design/DIRECTIONS_2026-09 · design/REDESIGN_2026-09_ground
          proposed, not decided   SPEC_custody · decisions/
AGENTS.md         for an AI agent operating the node
ARCHITECTURE.md   how it is built; SPEC.md   what was left out and when it returns; PRODUCT.md   who pays for what

Bring your own agent

A node is a thing you operate, and most people who install one will do it with an agent beside them. This repository is written for that: AGENTS.md opens with a table that routes an agent to one of four skills in skills/, and make lint fails if a skill names a command or a path that does not exist. Paste this to your agent and nothing else:

You are helping me with a PLANETAI node — an open-source program that turns a spare computer in my home or lab into a hyperlocal environmental monitor. Start by reading https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fabcity/planetai-node/main/AGENTS.md — its first section is a table that routes you to the right skill for what I am asking, and the rest of it is what you must not break. Read that skill before you tell me to run anything. Never ask me for the contents of my .env file, and never suggest exposing the node to the internet; the answer to reaching it from elsewhere is Tailscale.

llms.txt indexes every document here for an agent arriving from outside, and .mcp.json wires a clone of this repository to a running node — the URL and the token come from your shell, so nothing secret is in the file. planetai agent on the node prints the three facts you need for any other client.

Layout

app/       main.py · sources.py · index.py · packs.py · settings.py · agent.py · agent_loop.py · static/index.html
bin/       planetai, the command line
packs/     air-quality · heat · insight · trust · cold-start · open-data-health · coast · earth-engine · earth · place · example
config/    rules.yml · mosquitto · reticulum
tools/     the checks, hooks, bundle and release scripts, mesh-provision.sh, nas/, remote-model.sh
tests/     offline suites
presets/   bali · barcelona · boston · santiago · delhi

Licence

Apache 2.0. Fab City Foundation, 2026. Alpha; feedback to info@fab.city.