🌿 Wild Find

Wild Find sends kids 8 and up outside to find and photograph plants that grow near them. Open-weight models on the phone check each photo. No photo ever leaves the device.

Look. Photograph. Leave it where it grows.

• About
• Features
• Tech stack
• Architecture
• Project structure
• Getting started
• Configuration
• Security and privacy
• How to contribute
• What's next
• License
• Credits
• Author

Wild Find is an Android scavenger hunt for kids, played with a parent. Each hunt picks three plants that people have actually recorded nearby this month on iNaturalist. The kid finds each one, points the camera, and taps Capture. Models on the phone check the photo, so it never leaves the device, and the app warns when a plant might hurt to touch.

It's built for the DEV Hacktoberfest 2026 "Touch Grass" challenge. Ashley's challenge entry, Side Quests Grow on Trees (Leave Them Where They Grow), tells how it was built. The full spec is docs/PRD.md, the work queue is docs/stories.md, and every number below comes from a dated write-up in docs/results/.

---
title: How a capture becomes a find
---
flowchart LR
    accTitle: Wild Find architecture
    accDescr: The laptop pipeline builds tables and hints that ship in the APK; on the phone, one iNaturalist query picks targets and the on-device models check each capture.
    subgraph Laptop["Laptop, build time"]
        P["pipeline/ (uv)"] --> G["Gemma 4 via Ollama:<br/>hints, contact hazards"]
        P --> T["species table, labels,<br/>plant gate"]
    end
    subgraph Phone["Phone, play time"]
        A["Hunt pick"] --> C["Camera capture"]
        C --> TC["TinyCLIP:<br/>is it a plant?"]
        TC --> BC["BioCLIP:<br/>hazard? target?"]
        BC --> V["Verdict: Found,<br/>warning, or keep looking"]
    end
    I[("iNaturalist<br/>species_counts")] -->|"region center only"| A
    T --> A
    G --> A
    T --> BC

• One network call: each hunt sends iNaturalist the center of a whole-degree area and gets back what's been seen there. Nothing else leaves the phone.
• Verify: each Capture checks 3 frames. A hazard in the top 5 of about 4,272 known plants shows the warning. A find needs the target to beat every other local plant and lead every local toxic look-alike by a set margin, 3 frames in a row.
• Core vs. app: core/ decides; app/ draws the screens, runs the camera and models, and talks to iNaturalist.

wild-find/
├── app/               Android app: Compose screens, CameraX, ONNX Runtime, iNaturalist client
│   ├── src/main/assets/   committed art, labels, and Briar's animations
│   └── generated/         bundled models and tables from `make assets` (gitignored)
├── core/              game rules in pure Kotlin: region, sightings, hunt pick, verify
├── pipeline/          uv Python build steps
│   └── data/              committed build outputs: toxicity, hints, contact hazards
├── assets/source/     original art and Briar's source videos
├── docs/
│   ├── PRD.md             spec of record
│   ├── stories.md         work queue
│   └── results/           dated measurements behind every number
└── Makefile           every build, test, and device step

You need SDKMAN!, the Android SDK, uv, lefthook, ktlint, detekt, actionlint, and gitleaks. A phone with USB debugging is needed for device tests.

sdk env install   # the JDK pinned in .sdkmanrc
make setup        # lefthook hooks + uv sync
make assets       # bundled models and tables; the first run pulls about 160 MB of pinned files
make ai-checks    # lint, tests, build, secret scan
make install      # debug APK to a connected phone

• Phone choice: with more than one phone attached, set ANDROID_SERIAL in your shell; adb reads it.

• Release signing: create the key once, outside the repo:

  keytool -genkeypair -v -keystore ~/.android/wild-find-release.jks -alias wild-find -keyalg RSA -keysize 4096 -validity 10000

  Then add keystore.properties at the repo root. It's gitignored, so it never gets committed:

  storeFile=/Users/<you>/.android/wild-find-release.jks
  storePassword=...
  keyAlias=wild-find
  keyPassword=...

• Release build: make release writes one signed APK per phone CPU to app/build/outputs/apk/release/: app-arm64-v8a-release.apk (about 151 MB, for most phones) and app-armeabi-v7a-release.apk (about 141 MB, older 32-bit phones only). Without keystore.properties they build unsigned. Back up the key: losing it means people can't upgrade an installed copy.

• Photos stay on the phone. The found picture lives in memory for the Found screen and is never written to storage or sent anywhere.
• No location leaves the phone. iNaturalist only ever gets the center of a rounded whole-degree area, never the device's coordinates.
• No accounts, analytics, crash reporting, or remote config.
• No language model in the app. Gemma runs only on the laptop at build time; the phone only reads what it wrote.
• Never a safety promise. Kid copy never says a plant is safe, harmless, not poisonous, or okay to touch; the pipeline build and the device tests both fail on it. The hazard warning is extra caution, not a guarantee.
• Secrets: gitleaks runs on every commit and push; the release key and its properties file stay out of git.

• Read AGENTS.md and docs/PRD.md first; a change that contradicts the PRD updates it in the same commit.
• Branch from main and open a PR. Commits are signed, atomic Conventional Commits; gitlint checks them.
• make ai-checks must pass before every commit. Warnings fail the build.
• Measurements (speed, memory, accuracy) go into docs/results/ the same day, with date, device, versions, and inputs.

• A smaller APK (S71): store the species table at half precision, trim ONNX Runtime to the operators the models use, and lighten Briar's animations.
• Hazards per continent: the poison ivy family warns unseen only inside a North America box today; other continents rely on what iNaturalist has seen nearby.
• Read-aloud hints: the speaker button in the hint design waits on a decision.

MIT. Do what you like with the code: use it, change it, sell it, ship it in something bigger. Just keep the copyright notice and license text with any copy, and don't expect a warranty. The plant warnings are best effort, not a guarantee.

• Challenge: DEV and MLH for hosting the Hacktoberfest 2026 week 1 challenge
• Models on the phone: BioCLIP 2.5 Mobile and TinyCLIP ViT-8M/16
• Data: iNaturalist, Wikipedia, USDA PLANTS, GBIF, and Natural Earth
• Build-time only: BioCLIP 2.5 writes the tutorial label vectors on a laptop with OpenCLIP, and Gemma 4 (26b, through Ollama) writes the hints and the contact-hazard list from Wikipedia; none of them runs in the app
• Fonts: Fredoka and Atkinson Hyperlegible, SIL Open Font License 1.1

Ashley Childress · @anchildress1 on GitHub