planetai-node

Hyperlocal compute and intelligence for distributed production. A node is one computer per place, on hardware the place already owns. It reads what measures that place, from a particle sensor on the wall to a satellite overhead, tells the people there in plain sentences what to do about it, records what they did, and measures whether it worked. Its purpose is fixed: clean air, water and soil for the people and the other living things around each node. Raw readings stay on the machine; only summaries travel.

Beta. main is the beta channel: every update is signed, and a node refuses one that does not verify. It is still an experiment, and 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 https://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

Twenty years of fab labs and makerspaces built a distributed infrastructure for making things, and since 2014 the cities of the Fab City pledge have committed to producing half of what they consume by 2054. What that infrastructure never had is computing of its own: a machine at each place that reads the place, works out what it needs, and says why it should be made there rather than shipped in. A node is that machine.

The rule it runs on is Fab City's rule for production, applied to data: DIDO, data in, data out. Raw readings stay on the machine; only summaries travel, to a parent node if you name one, to the Fab City Index, and to the models that need ground truth. Today a node reads air and heat from sensors, land and coast from public and satellite sources; water and soil have no pack yet, and no node has handed a job to a workshop yet. Programme: planetai.fab.city · documentation: planetai.fab.city/docs.

What it does

• Connects every scale. Sensors on WiFi (Smart Citizen, and Xiaomi purifiers through a wild pack; the AirGradient and PurpleAir adapters are written and not polled in this version), 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 house 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 act-level alerts somebody answered, a number the Index never had.
• Shows the place. A dashboard that leads with whatever the node puts first, as a number and a sentence, then the day as an annotated chart, every source with a note, the sea, the land, the weather. Five doors: Now, Place, Data, Node and Wall, with Set up behind the gear (Set up › Rooms names the room each sensor is in); the Wall walks out from the house through four scales by itself. ?layout=mobile is the phone page, ?layout=classic the earlier six-view dashboard. Paper or dark.
• Answers questions. Ask the node from the dashboard's pane, or from a bot on your Telegram. Both run a small model on your own machine by default, read the node and explain it; point them at a bigger model on your network when you have one. Every answer says which model gave it and where that model runs, and nothing goes online unless somebody here chooses it.
• Remembers what worked. Once a day it compares what happened after the alerts somebody answered with the ones nobody did, learns what is usual here, and keeps a diary by day, week, month and year that the morning message carries (LEARN_PUSH). None of it leaves the machine.
• Keeps the household's pictures and things. A photo sent to the bot or added on the page is kept on storage the household picks and, once EYES_MODEL names one, described by an image model on this machine; with the household's yes, a plant or animal is named by GBIF and marked introduced or invasive from GRIIS. The things a home keeps are counted privately; only what it would lend or give is published (/offers).
• Keeps the data where it was made. Local database, nightly backups a NAS can collect, an open daily export you decide where to send. A screen without the token reads "Room A" and "Sensor 1", never the house's own names.
• Grows by folders. Air, heat, coast, land, place (what is around you, from OpenStreetMap, in PostGIS), fires (NASA FIRMS), the ground's heat from orbit (Landsat and MODIS) and open-data packs ship, and Bali Air Dispatch's stations as a pack of their own: 19 core packs. Water, energy, noise, classroom CO₂ are a folder of rules each, written by whoever needs them, for their place.

Node #1, bayu-ungasan, has run in Kuta Selatan, Bali, since 2 September 2026 (above). Node #2 has run in Menorca since 10 September.

Read next

The documentation site is planetai.fab.city/docs — the same pages, with a sidebar, search and the API reference, built from this repository by tools/build_docs.py. The files themselves:

docs/     getting a node running   START_HERE · PLATFORMS · REVIVE_A_LAPTOP · MAC_MINI · UPDATING · STORAGE · ARM64
          when it goes wrong       TROUBLESHOOTING
          what it can tell you     USE_CASES · sensors · DOMAINS · COVERAGE · PREFILL · GUI · MODELS
          radios and reachability  NETWORKING · MESHTASTIC
          extending it             PACKS · PACK_IDEAS · SOURCES · DEVELOPING
          testing a beta           BETA_TESTER_GUIDE · FAB26_EXPERIMENT
          releasing it             WORKFLOW · NEXT_RELEASE · SIGNING
          specs, each with status  SPEC_custody · SPEC_identity · SPEC_rho · SPEC_discovery · SPEC_decide · SPEC_alerts · SPEC_dashboard_events · SPEC_event_led_state · SPEC_dashboard_figures · SPEC_language · SPEC_journeys · SPEC_mobile · SPEC_hello · SPEC_eyes · SPEC_species · SPEC_inventory · SPEC_learn · SPEC_fablab · SPEC_radio · SPEC_place_analyses · SPEC_terrain · SPEC_sensors
          proposed, then decided   proposals/ · decisions/
          the documentation site   site/ (planetai.fab.city/docs)
          the page's design rounds design/ (not shipped to nodes)
          history                  archive/ (handoffs, reviews, plans: what was true then, not now)
SECURITY.md       reporting a vulnerability, and the key a node checks an update against
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

Who runs this

One person maintains it today, with a second holding access and a proposed scope — MAINTAINERS.md. GOVERNANCE.md says who has to agree to what, and why the installer and init.sql need two people.

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 eight 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 · issues/ · packs.py · settings.py · ask.py · agent.py · agent_loop.py · report.py ·
           learn.py · fundamentals.py · static/
bin/       planetai, the command line
packs/     air-quality · heat · insight · trust · cold-start · open-data-health · coast · earth-engine · earth · place ·
           nearby · season · forecast · make · thingdata · fire · surface-heat · example-cooking-hours
config/    rules.yml · channels.yml · mosquitto · reticulum
tools/     the checks, hooks, bundle and release scripts, radio.py + radio_profiles/ (planetai radio), nas/, remote-model.sh
tests/     offline suites
presets/   bali · barcelona · boston · santiago · delhi · menorca

Licence

Apache 2.0 today; AGPL-3.0-or-later once every contributor has consented (docs/decisions/2026-09-25-licence.md). Fab City Foundation, 2026. Beta; feedback to info@fab.city.