Offline · on-device · open source
PlayaPal
A complete playa companion.
The event guide, your camp's board, a whiteout compass, the city map, and
your people live on your phone and keep working in airplane mode at 3am.
There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to connect to. Every tool
works without AI. If you want it, an on-device model called the Playa
Angel ties them together in plain conversation.
This demo is staged, since the page has no backend. But it shows the real flow: the app searches the guide stored on your phone and cites what it found.
What it is
An offline toolkit for Black Rock City that lives entirely on your phone: the real event guide, a survival manual you can read straight through, your camp's board, a whiteout compass, the city map, your friends' camps — and your pod, keeping track of each other with no signal at all. All of it works before any AI model is installed. If you add the Playa Angel, a small open model tuned on these same guides, you can also just ask.
Tiny model, real brain
A 2.6-billion-parameter open-weights model, fine-tuned for playa life and quantized to run fast on ordinary phones.
Looks things up
Instead of guessing, it searches the event guide and survival manual stored on your phone and cites its sources.
Data packs
Drop in your own camp's docs and it becomes your camp's guide. A pack is just files, built to a published authoring spec with a validator, so any camp can make one.
Whiteout compass
Every located event links to one giant arrow with the distance and clock-address directions from wherever you stand. Drop a pin at camp and Take me home will point you back through a 3am whiteout.
The camp board
Gifts and needs travel phone-to-phone over AirDrop or Quick Share, so the board spreads without any signal. A camp passphrase seals each beam against tampering in transit.
Speaks out loud
Answers can be read aloud through your phone's own offline voice, which keeps your eyes on the dust and the art instead of the screen.
Find your friends
Share a friend card as a QR code any camera can scan: where you camp and how to find you. The card travels inside the code itself, so it never touches a server or an address book. Friends' camps get a compass arrow, a walk time, and a spot on the map.
The whole city, offline
A map of Black Rock City drawn from measured geometry: streets, plazas, toilet banks, your pins, your people, and your blue dot. The whole map is a few kilobytes of math, so there is nothing to download.
Camp Mesh
Start a pod — or join one by its spoken code — and your phones keep track of each other over Bluetooth: which way, how far, live when you're near. Leave typed or spoken messages on the pod's answering machine; they hop phone to phone until they arrive. On the camp's Wi-Fi, hold the walkie and talk live. No server, no signal, no account anywhere in it.
Day and night
A sun-washed light mode and a true dark mode for 3am, matched to your phone or pinned — every label carries both.
For the AI-skeptical burner
Most of this app is for you, too. No model required.
Every word is generated on the phone in your hand: no account, no tracking, no cost, and the source is open.
The serious arguments against AI deserve serious answers. Building small, local, and open is this project's attempt to answer them honestly.
Isn't AI flooding the burn with low-effort slop?▾
A lot of it is, and the artists are right to be angry. This app doesn't generate art, logos, or camp songs for anyone to pass off as their own. It's a guidebook that answers questions, and most of its answers point you at things humans made: real events, real camps, real art out on the open playa.
Big tech already colonized the playa. Why bring AI too?▾
This isn't big tech. It's one burner in a garage with second-hand GPUs, no investors, and a pocket guidebook that admits what it doesn't know. The only thing it wants from you is to help you find the pancakes.
Techno-utopianism sells AI as civilization's answer. This is a counter-argument you can hold in your hand: small, local, humble, and yours.
AI datacenters drink rivers. How is this okay?▾
That critique is real, and it's why this project is built the way it is. All the training ran on two second-hand Intel GPUs in a home closet, measured live at 252 watts per card, about what an old incandescent bulb draws. A training run used roughly one kilowatt-hour, and the whole month of experimental runs cost a few dollars of electricity in total.
Answering a question on your phone draws about as much power as the flashlight. There is no datacenter involved, and no water. The base model is open weights that already exist for everyone; our published recipe adds the playa knowledge for less electricity than one American household uses in a day. Leave No Trace, applied to compute.
+ the receipts
- hardware2× second-hand Intel Arc (Battlemage G31)
- draw under load252 W per card, measured at the wall
- per training run≈ 1 kWh
- whole programdozens of runs · ~100 GPU-hours
- electricity, totala few dollars
- weights + recipehuggingface.co/davidryalpug/playa-angel
Every AI product is a data-mining operation.▾
There is nothing to mine and nowhere to send it. The app runs in airplane mode, keeps no account, and reports nothing back, not even crashes. Your 3am questions stay between you and your phone all week. Leave No Trace, applied to data.
Won't this glue people to their phones?▾
It's built to be the opposite of a feed. Nothing notifies you, nothing scrolls forever, and nothing begs you to come back. You ask, it answers, and you put the phone away. Because it needs no infrastructure, it makes the gear you already carry more capable when everything else is dark. Radical Self-Reliance shouldn't stop at your water supply.
Okay. So what's the catch? Who's monetizing this?▾
Nobody. There are no ads and no premium tier, and there isn't even an account to attach a bill to. It's a gift in the plain burner sense, made for the city and given to the city. The code, the weights, and the training recipe are published, so the gift includes the means of making more gifts. Decommodification isn't a vibe here; it's the architecture.
It was built in a garage, trained on a couple of consumer GPUs, and published openly: weights, code, and the recipe. Local-first AI can be useful and kind, and this is a working example you can hold.
Who you'll meet
The Playa Angel
Your guide. Where's breakfast on burn day, how much water per person, what's a Dusty Mary (it will tell you, honestly, that it doesn't know). It keeps answers short and admits what it doesn't know.
The Historian soon
A campfire elder for stories and lore. Feed it your own camp's history with a data pack.
The Teller soon
The Memory Bank's teller window, in your pocket. Feed it your camp's stories with a data pack.
Field notes
» Does it really work with no internet?
That's the whole point. Airplane mode is the intended habitat. Download once at home, use all week in the dust.
» What phones?
Recent Androids and iPhones with 6 GB or more of memory run the full Angel comfortably. 4 GB phones run Angel Light, the same guide with a smaller brain (tested on an iPhone 13 mini).
» Will it hallucinate?
Less than you'd think. For facts it reads the actual guide instead of remembering, and it's trained to say "I don't know that one" rather than invent. Treat it as a campfire friend, not a court reporter.
» When can I get it?
It’s out now — grab it below, with a final event-data update coming once the 2026 guide is locked. The releases live on GitHub.
» Open source?
Yes. The app code and the model weights are published, and bring-your-own-model and bring-your-own-data are first-class.
Get it
Android · always the newest release playapal.apkOne direct link, straight from the GitHub releases — it always serves the latest version. Everything is in the one file; the AI model is an optional download inside the app, on wifi, later.
» Android will challenge the install twice. That’s normal.
Playa Pal isn’t on the Play Store yet (that’s coming, after the burn), so your phone treats it like any app it hasn’t met before. One: open the downloaded file — if nothing happens, find it in the Files app → Downloads. Two: switch on “Allow from this source” when Android asks. Three: Play Protect warns that it hasn’t seen this developer — tap More details, then the small “Install anyway”; the big button cancels. The warning means new developer, not danger: the whole app is open source, and every release is built in the open from the public code.
» Getting it from a campmate, with no internet at all
Any phone that has Playa Pal can hand over the whole app: Settings → Share Playa Pal beams the installer by Quick Share, Bluetooth, or a cable. On the receiving phone, skip the transfer popup’s own “Open” button — it sometimes launches the wrong app — and open the file from Files → Downloads instead. Then the same taps as above. Once it’s installed, the .apk file in Downloads can be deleted — the app is self-contained.
» Updates without a store
Point Obtainium at simbi-community-dev/playapal and new releases arrive the way a store would deliver them. Or just come back to the button above — it always points at the newest one.
» iPhone
Through TestFlight — join the public beta at testflight.apple.com/join/V3fD1rSd. Friend cards and camp beams already travel fine between iPhones and Androids.