BlackboardLM

Your documents, grounded answers. Upload your materials, ask questions, and get AI-powered insights backed by your sources — like having a research partner who has read everything you've shared.

Built with Reflex, powered by MarkitDown for document parsing and a browser-side LightRAG Web Worker for knowledge-graph RAG. No Node.js required — bring your own DeepSeek-compatible API key. Model files are downloaded directly from HuggingFace by the browser.

Features

📎 Grounded Answers with Source Citations

Every answer is anchored in your documents. BlackboardLM reads your uploaded files, builds a knowledge graph, and retrieves the most relevant information for each question. The system prompt instructs the model to provide inline citations ([1], [2]), a References section, and suggested follow-up questions to deepen your exploration.

📄 Document Upload & Parsing

Drag and drop PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, TXT, Markdown, HTML, EPUB, JPG, PNG, TIFF, CSV, JSON, or XML. Files are automatically parsed by MarkitDown on the Python backend, then indexed by the browser-side LightRAG engine into a searchable knowledge base. Click any uploaded file to preview its full content rendered as Markdown.

🕸️ Knowledge Graph

Every document set generates an interactive knowledge graph showing key entities and their relationships. The graph visualizes the conceptual structure of your materials — click the toggle to expand or collapse it. Nodes are sized by importance and color-coded by entity type. Graph data persists via IndexedDB and is restored on page reload.

🎛️ 8 Preset Conversation Modes

Quickly shift the AI's approach with one-click presets above the input bar:

Preset	What it does
Summary	Comprehensive summary of all documents
Study Guide	Key concepts, definitions, and review questions
FAQ	10–15 essential Q&A pairs from your content
Briefing	Executive overview of key findings and data
Timeline	Chronological extraction of key events
Concepts	Core terminology with definitions and relationships
Critique	Critical analysis of arguments, gaps, and weak points
Deep Dive	Exhaustive layered analysis of your question

🔍 5 Retrieval Strategies

Choose how BlackboardLM searches your documents:

Mode	Behavior
Naive	Direct LLM answer, no retrieval — chat mode
Local	Vector search over document chunks
Global	Knowledge graph entity summaries
Hybrid	Combined local + global
Mix	All three — naive, local, and global

🎨 Dual Themes

Theme	Style
🏰 Flourish & Blotts	Dark magical-academia aesthetic, parchment textures, candlelight flicker, floating star particles
🌸 栞 (Shiori)	Light Japanese bookmark-shop aesthetic, muted pinks and greens, falling sakura petals

Each theme comes with its own color palette, typography, microcopy, and background animations — every text label and placeholder adapts to the theme.

🔐 Authentication

Set ACCESS_PASSWORD in your .env or deployment environment to enable password protection. When configured, a login card appears before the main interface. Enter the password to unlock the app — a persistent cookie keeps you logged in across page refreshes, so you only need to enter it once per browser session.

When no password is set, the app opens directly without authentication — ideal for local development. A Logout button in the Settings panel lets you sign out and return to the login screen.

⚙️ Settings Panel

A slide-out drawer for live configuration. Change your API key, base URL, model, thinking mode, reasoning effort, output length, retrieval strategy, and response style without restarting the app. Settings persist to .env and take effect on the next request.

A Clear All Data button resets everything — knowledge graph, indexed documents, chat history, cached previews, and dedup records — returning the app to a fresh state. When authentication is enabled, a Logout button is also available.

🐱 Loading Screen

A CSS-only spinning cat (from hexo-theme-shoka) appears while the knowledge graph initializes. Click to dismiss, or it fades out automatically once your documents are ready.

📱 Responsive Layout

Adapts gracefully from desktop to mobile, with a scrollable document shelf, collapsible graph, and fixed bottom input bar.

🧰 Tech Stack

Layer	Technology
Framework	Reflex (Tailwind v4, Radix Themes)
Document Parsing	MarkitDown — 15 formats (PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, EPUB, HTML, MD, TXT, JPG, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, CSV, JSON, XML)
Knowledge Graph RAG	Browser-side Web Worker (LightRAG architecture), in-memory graph + vector DB, IndexedDB persistence
LLM	DeepSeek-compatible API, called directly from browser via `fetch`
Embedding	`Xenova/multilingual-e5-small` via Transformers.js (WASM), 384-dim. Model files downloaded directly from HuggingFace by the browser
Graph Visualization	Cytoscape.js, loaded from unpkg CDN
Vector DB	In-memory cosine similarity (lightrag built-in)

📁 Project Structure

BlackboardLM/
├── rxconfig.py                     # Reflex entry point
├── requirements.txt                # Python dependencies
├── .env                            # Environment variables
├── assets/
│   ├── favicon.ico
│   ├── rag.worker.js               # LightRAG + Transformers.js Web Worker
│   └── rag_bridge.js               # Main-thread bridge (Worker ↔ Reflex state)
├── BlackboardLM/
│   ├── BlackboardLM.py             # App entry
│   ├── state.py                    # Global state & bridge event handlers
│   ├── config/
│   │   ├── settings.py             # Env loading, defaults, .env write-back
│   │   ├── theme.py                # Dual theme definitions
│   │   └── prompts.py              # System prompts & preset modes
│   ├── components/
│   │   ├── layout.py               # Page layout, hidden bridge divs
│   │   ├── styles.py               # Global CSS & JS (Cytoscape, bridge loader)
│   │   ├── header.py               # Nav bar & theme switcher
│   │   ├── settings_panel.py       # Settings drawer
│   │   ├── auth.py                 # Login card
│   │   ├── documents.py            # Upload zone & doc preview
│   │   ├── star_chart.py           # Knowledge graph component
│   │   ├── chat.py                 # Chat message bubbles
│   │   ├── input_bar.py            # Input field & preset chips
│   │   └── decorations.py          # Background particles
│   ├── rag/
│   │   └── engine.py               # LLM config provider
│   └── pipeline/
│       └── parsers/
│           ├── base.py             # Abstract parser interface
│           └── markitdown_parser.py # MarkitDown document parser
└── lightrag/
    ├── package.json
    ├── server.js                   # Node.js entry (for standalone/CLI use)
    └── src/
        ├── index.js                # Node.js exports
        ├── lightrag.js             # Core RAG engine
        ├── vector_db.js            # In-memory cosine-similarity vector DB
        ├── graph.js                # Knowledge graph
        ├── chunker.js              # Token-based text chunker
        ├── embedder.js             # Transformers.js embedding wrapper
        ├── prompts.js              # Entity extraction prompt
        └── storage.js              # IndexedDB persistence (browser)

🚀 Getting Started

1. Install Python dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

2. Configure your API key

Edit .env:

DEEPSEEK_API_KEY=sk-your-api-key
DEEPSEEK_BASE_URL=https://api.deepseek.com

All other settings have sensible defaults and can be changed via the Settings panel.

3. Run

reflex init
reflex run

Open http://localhost:3000 (dev mode). In production, the app runs on a single port (http://localhost:8000).

On first launch, the embedding model (~470 MB) is downloaded directly from HuggingFace. The model is cached by your browser for instant reuse on subsequent loads. A progress indicator shows download and indexing status.

☁️ Deploy to Reflex Cloud

Reflex Cloud deploys your app to Fly.io behind a custom domain in one command. No Docker, no CI/CD, no YAML.

Prerequisites

Fork this repository to your own GitHub account
A Reflex Cloud account
reflex CLI installed (pip install reflex) and authenticated:

reflex login

This opens your browser to sign in with GitHub or Google. After login, go to the Reflex Cloud dashboard, create a new project, and copy the reflex deploy command — it contains your project's access token:

reflex deploy --project <your-project-id>

Step 1 — Set your password

Open rxconfig.py and set a login password for your app:

os.environ.setdefault("ACCESS_PASSWORD", "your-password-here")

Leave it "" to skip authentication.

Step 2 — Deploy

Run the deploy command from the Cloud dashboard:

reflex deploy --project <your-project-id>

Press Enter at the interactive prompts. The CLI compiles your app, uploads it, and the build continues in the background. You can close the terminal once the upload finishes.

Step 3 — Set your API key (recommended: deploy with `--env`)

Recommended — pass it at deploy time:

reflex deploy --project <id> --env DEEPSEEK_API_KEY=sk-your-key

This bakes the key into the deployment so it survives backend restarts. Environment variables persist across re-deploys.

Alternative — use the in-app Settings panel. Click the gear icon, fill in your API key, and click Save & Apply. Changes take effect immediately. However, note that on the free tier the backend restarts periodically, which clears session-stored settings. Using --env avoids this.

Step 4 — Update your app

After making code changes, simply run reflex deploy --project <your-project-id> again. Settings configured through the in-app panel persist across deploys — only code changes require a re-deploy.

Note: The embedding model (Xenova/multilingual-e5-small, ~470 MB) is downloaded directly from HuggingFace by each user's browser on first visit. No server bandwidth cost for model serving.

Usage

📤 Uploading Documents

Drag files directly onto the upload zone at the top of the page, or click it to open your system file picker. You can upload multiple files in one go — they appear as cards in a horizontally scrollable shelf. While a file is being parsed, its card shows a spinner. Once ready, click any card to expand a document preview panel with the full Markdown-rendered content, including tables.

Supported formats: PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, TXT, Markdown, HTML, EPUB, JPG, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, CSV, JSON, XML.

Behind the scenes: the Python backend parses each document with MarkitDown, sends the text to the browser, and the LightRAG Web Worker chunks, embeds, and extracts entities — all while showing live progress.

💬 Asking Questions

Type your question and press Enter (use Shift+Enter for newlines). The browser-side LightRAG engine retrieves relevant context from your documents, then calls the LLM API directly for a streaming answer. Each response includes:

Inline citations — [1], [2] linking to your documents
References — a list of cited sources at the end
Dive Deeper — 3–5 suggested follow-up questions

The conversation carries context across turns, so you can drill deeper naturally.

🕸️ Knowledge Graph

After documents are processed, an interactive knowledge graph appears below the upload shelf. It visualizes the concepts and entities extracted from your files, connected by the relationships discovered between them. Use the chevron button on the title bar to collapse or expand the graph. The graph is rendered with Cytoscape.js — you can pan and zoom to explore dense clusters. Nodes are sized by their connection count (degree) and color-coded by entity type. Hover over a node to see its full description; edges show the keyword linking two entities.

When no documents are loaded, the graph area shows a placeholder message. While documents are parsing, it displays a processing indicator. Both adapt to the active theme.

🎛️ Preset Modes

Eight preset chips are positioned above the input bar, collapsed by default. Click "Presets ▸" to reveal them, then click any chip to activate that mode. The selected chip highlights in the theme's primary color. Click it again to deselect and return to the default conversation style. Only one preset can be active at a time.

Each preset injects a specific instruction into the system prompt, shaping how the AI structures its response. For example, Study Guide adds "create a study guide with key concepts, definitions, and review questions"; Timeline asks for chronological event extraction. The presets are defined in config/prompts.py under PRESET_MODES.

🔍 Query Strategies

Control how BlackboardLM retrieves information from your documents via the Query Mode dropdown in Settings. The default is Naive (sends your question directly to the LLM with no retrieval — fast, lightweight chat mode). Switch to Local for vector search over document chunks, Global for knowledge graph entity summaries, Hybrid for both, or Mix for all three combined. The choice persists in .env under QUERY_MODE.

🎨 Themes

Two theme chips sit in the top navigation bar: 🏰 Flourish & Blotts (dark magical-academia) and 🌸 栞 (light Japanese). Click either to switch instantly — colors, fonts, background particles, button styles, and all microcopy change together. The active theme is read from the THEME env var on startup and defaults to sakura.

All theme data lives in config/theme.py as two Theme dataclass instances. Adding a new theme means creating a third instance, adding it to THEMES dict, updating the conditional in layout._main_app(), and registering a switch chip in header.py.

⚙️ Settings Panel

Click the gear icon in the header to open the settings drawer. Configure your API key, model, thinking mode, reasoning depth, output token limit, retrieval strategy, and response style. Changes are saved to .env and applied on the next request — no restart needed.

🔧 Configuration

Environment Variables

Variable	Default	Description
`ACCESS_PASSWORD`	`""`	Login password (empty = no auth)
`DEEPSEEK_API_KEY`	—	Your DeepSeek API key
`DEEPSEEK_BASE_URL`	`https://api.deepseek.com`	API endpoint
`LLM_MODEL`	`deepseek-v4-flash`	Model name
`LLM_THINKING`	`disabled`	Deep thinking mode
`LLM_REASONING_EFFORT`	`max`	Reasoning depth (`low` / `medium` / `high` / `max`)
`LLM_MAX_TOKENS`	`16384`	Max output tokens
`QUERY_MODE`	`naive`	Default retrieval strategy
`RESPONSE_TYPE`	`Multiple Paragraphs`	Response formatting style
`THEME`	`sakura`	Default theme (`sakura` / `hogwarts`)
All values can be changed at runtime via the Settings panel.

🧠 Prompt System

The system prompt is assembled from modular blocks in config/prompts.py:

Role & Goal          → "You are BlackboardLM, an AI research assistant..."
Deep Analysis        → Multi-angle thinking before answering
Comprehensiveness    → Detailed, structured, well-elaborated answers
Grounding            → Primary: document sources. Secondary: general knowledge. Always distinguish.
Citations            → Inline [n] + References section (max 5)
Dive Deeper          → 3–5 follow-up questions at the end
Formatting           → Rich Markdown, reply in user's language
Constraints          → No one-line answers, no fabrication, always close with a summary

When a preset is selected, its instruction is appended as an additional directive.

Context is injected by the browser-side lightrag engine — vector chunks for local/hybrid/mix modes, knowledge graph entities for global/hybrid/mix modes. The {response_type} placeholder in the prompt is formatted at query time from the Settings value.

📄 License

MIT

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
Latest commit History 19 Commits
BlackboardLM		BlackboardLM
assets		assets
lightrag		lightrag
reflex.lock		reflex.lock
.gitignore		.gitignore
AGENTS.md		AGENTS.md
CLAUDE.md		CLAUDE.md
README.md		README.md
pyproject.toml		pyproject.toml
requirements.txt		requirements.txt
rxconfig.py		rxconfig.py

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BlackboardLM

🗺️ Table of Contents

Features

📎 Grounded Answers with Source Citations

📄 Document Upload & Parsing

🕸️ Knowledge Graph

🎛️ 8 Preset Conversation Modes

🔍 5 Retrieval Strategies

🎨 Dual Themes

🔐 Authentication

⚙️ Settings Panel

🐱 Loading Screen

📱 Responsive Layout

🧰 Tech Stack

📁 Project Structure

🚀 Getting Started

1. Install Python dependencies

2. Configure your API key

3. Run

☁️ Deploy to Reflex Cloud

Prerequisites

Step 1 — Set your password

Step 2 — Deploy

Step 3 — Set your API key (recommended: deploy with --env)

Step 4 — Update your app

Usage

📤 Uploading Documents

💬 Asking Questions

🕸️ Knowledge Graph

🎛️ Preset Modes

🔍 Query Strategies

🎨 Themes

⚙️ Settings Panel

🔧 Configuration

Environment Variables

🧠 Prompt System

📄 License

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Step 3 — Set your API key (recommended: deploy with `--env`)