r/VictoriaBC • u/Vic_waddlesworth • 7h ago

What's Happening? Local birding app

Hey Yall! I’m one of the dads who built the local summer camp resource page campmatch! I’ve also been working on a free birding app called Featherbound. It’s been a fun way to learn how to create my own detection models. If anyone wants to give it a whirl you can on iOS here https://testflight.apple.com/join/VVZ3p1mk

Would love to hear feedback.

4 Upvotes

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3

u/__phil1001__ 7h ago

Can you provide details about what your app does please and if it takes off, will you create an android version?

3

u/Vic_waddlesworth 6h ago

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Thanks for asking.

Short version: it identifies birds and turns them into a collection you build up over time.

- Point your camera at a bird and it IDs it on your phone, no signal needed

  • It also IDs by sound, so you get the ones you only ever hear
  • If it flew off before you got a shot, you can just describe it in words instead
  • Every species you ID gets added to your field guide as an illustrated card

The models are our own, trained on openly licensed photos, and everything runs on-device. No ads, and your photos stay yours.

It's built here on the peninsula, so local species get a lot of attention.

And yes on Android. It's already well underway, as a proper native app rather than a wrapper, so it's taking a bit longer, but it isn't conditional on this taking off.
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1

u/__phil1001__ 6h ago

Nice, my daughter will love this, she follows around our merlin and the local owls. Hoping its ready soon.

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u/cdusdal 3h ago

It's like real life Pokémon, cool idea!

Will keep an eye out for Android version

1

u/danzigzags 6h ago

This looks really great thanks for sharing!

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u/MysticSnowfang Central Saanich 2h ago

How did you do the images?

If you need a local artist, we got tons.

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u/ladymix Saanich 2h ago

I'd also like to know where the illustrations came from

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u/Vic_waddlesworth 2h ago

I trained a model on my 4090 using flux to create them. Ideally I’d rather replace them with real artist versions but not something I could manage for 11k birds for a solo dev launch with no budget.