[08]hackathon

★ First outstation hackathon

Eclipse 6.0

Participant

My first outstation offline hackathon: 24 hours at Thapar, Patiala. The brief was a real-time voice agent on a fine-tuned small language model. We built ASHA-VANI, an offline Hinglish voice assistant for ASHA health workers in rural India, with no internet needed. Every part worked on its own. Getting them all working together was the real boss fight.

When
April 2026
Where
TIET, Patiala, Punjab
Hosted by
ACM Thapar · Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology
Format
in person · 24 hours
Track
SLM Voice Agents · Oumi sponsor track (EC602)
Evolve AI at Eclipse 6.0

[01]The squad

Evolve AI

  • Govind Jindal← that's me
  • Manan Kochhar
  • Piyush Sharma
  • Bhavishya Grover
  • Asmit Chitkara

[02]The rounds

  1. Round 1

    The shortlist

    An online first round picked the teams for Thapar. Ours made the cut, which meant packing bags for Patiala.

    Selected ✓

  2. Round 2

    The 24 hours

    Round 2, offline at TIET on 4–5 April: frontend, backend, voice and dataset, split four ways and built side by side.

    Built ✓

  3. Round 3

    The final submission

    The last step was a Git repo of the whole thing. Ours wasn't put together yet, so we didn't submit it.

    📦 Repo left behind

[03]What we built

ASHA-VANI

ASHA-VANI home page

  • A fine-tuned 3B model

    Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct fine-tuned with Oumi LoRA (rank 8) on about 1,800 Hinglish ASHA protocol pairs. Training loss fell from 2.76 to 0.76 in 312 steps.

  • 4-bit, fully offline

    The adapter is fused into the base model and quantised to 4-bit on Apple MLX, so it runs on a laptop with no network at all.

  • Hinglish speech-to-text

    faster-whisper (small, int8) primed with a Hinglish medical vocabulary, plus rule-based fixes for the words it mishears, like "prasab" → "prasav".

  • A Hindi voice

    Piper TTS with the Priyamvada Hindi voice reads every answer aloud, all on-device.

  • Calm triage

    Words like "jhatke", "khoon" or "behosh" flag a case as urgent and shift the UI into a critical state, without alarming anyone.

  • Knows when to say "I don't know"

    Out-of-scope questions (cancer, surgery, an ECG) get one answer: go to the PHC or call 108 right away. No guessing.

  • A latency budget

    Each stage has a target: STT 150 ms, model 100 ms, speech 200 ms, under 500 ms end to end. Anything slower is flagged red.

Qwen2.5-3BOumi (LoRA)MLX 4-bitfaster-whisperPiper TTSOpenWakeWordFastAPIReact + Vite

GitHubEvent

[04]Side quests

  • The night before

    The prep started the night before: ideas, roles and setup, all before we'd even reached Patiala. 🌙

    Prep mode

  • "Saheli"… or Jarvis?

    The pitch had a custom wake word, "Saheli". The custom model never got trained, so the code fell back to a stand-in. Our ASHA assistant answered to "Hey Jarvis". 🦾

    Hey Jarvis

  • Sponsored by Quenzy

    The desk slowly filled with sponsor chips and cans. Count them in the photos below. 🥔

    Fuelled ✓

  • The repo we left behind

    The final step was a Git submission. Ours wasn't ready, so we walked out without submitting. A day later, back home, we pushed it anyway. 😅

    Unsubmitted

[05]Plot twist

Four parts that worked. One app that wouldn't. 🧩

Four laptops, four working pieces, one repo still unwritten.
Four laptops, four working pieces, one repo still unwritten.

Then 😱

The split was perfect: frontend, backend, voice and dataset, one owner each. Every piece ran on its own laptop. We were sure that plugging them together would take ten minutes. 😌

Now 🧠

Integration is the project. The hard part was never one piece. It was the contracts between them: audio formats, ports, model paths, and four people with four different "works on my machine". 🔌

[06]The repo, after the fact

Commits
6
Avg. message
34.5 chars
Shortest
“Initial commit”

The hackathon ended on 5 April with nothing pushed. The first commit landed a day later, the voice was fixed on 7 April, and the 4-bit MLX migration came on the 8th. We didn't need a deadline to finish it. 🧩✅

[07]From the floor

Five badges, team number 6
Five badges, team number 6
Thapar, Patiala
Thapar, Patiala
The squad
The squad
"Say Hi to ASHA!" (it was listening for Jarvis)
"Say Hi to ASHA!" (it was listening for Jarvis)
Terminals and cans, deep into the night
Terminals and cans, deep into the night
ASHA वाणी
ASHA वाणी
Fuel, courtesy of the sponsors
Fuel, courtesy of the sponsors
The brief: SLM Voice Agents, powered by Oumi
The brief: SLM Voice Agents, powered by Oumi

[08]The certificate

Certificate for Eclipse 6.0Delivered ✓

Certificate found. 📬

Round 2, offline hackathon, team Evolve AI, Thapar. 📜 Earned in 24 hours on roughly zero hours of sleep. 😴✅

“Splitting the work was the easy part. Joining it back together was the real project. Thapar taught me to agree how the pieces fit before writing any of them, and that an unsubmitted repo can still turn into a finished one.”

Next hackathon

NeuraCode 2.0: Where Logic Meets Glory

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