Surfing for Science: Phil Bresnahan of Smartfin

Welcome to the Mecca FEHB engineering podcast. I'm your guest, Phil Bresnahan.

And we are your hosts Parker Dolman

and Steven Craig.

This is episode 164. A quick announcement before we jump into the podcast, key con 2019 is a user conference for a popular open source CAD program key CAD happening April 26 and 27th 2019 in Chicago, Illinois. This is the first and largest gathering of hardware developers using KiCad. Talks at the conference will span hardware design, revision control, scripting, manufacturing considerations, proper library management and getting started developing the underlying tools for KiCad. All announced talks have been listed on the conference site, which is in the show notes.

filbur Bresnahan, has made the water his playground and office for most of his life. Phil is a senior development engineer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a department of UC San Diego, and the lead engineer of the smart fin project.

So Phil, who are you?

You're kind of starting with the hardest question first there. I'm trying to figure that out. Myself. Yeah. So I split my time among a couple different things here at Scripps and smart fin, and I'll talk about what, what all those are. But I'm trained as both a chemical engineer and an oceanographer. And in my day to day life, I combine those and focus on developing chemical sensors for marine pollution studies, essentially. And through my work at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, I got introduced to the smartphone project, which is a nonprofit initiative of the last word project, a nonprofit arts focused organization. And I've been leading the research and development efforts there for smartphone for a bit. So what is the smartphone Project smartfren is sort of two things on the one hand, it's surfboard fin with sensors in it. And so most surfboards have interchangeable surfboard fins, they can come out with just a couple seconds of allen key turning and take out your plastic or fiberglass or carbon fiber fin you can put in the smart fin and instantly be collecting oceanographic data just by going in the water. So smart fin, it's an Internet of Things and Connected Smart surfboard fin right now we're measuring temperature, motion and position GPS position. And then we have wireless data transmission to get data back to the cloud, and where we make it freely available to anyone. So that's one side. On the other side. It's an outreach initiative, geared at communicating what we know is already happening in the coastal ocean with different groups. And we think that the surf communities are really a great group to work with, because they have this deeply vested interest in coastal health themselves as people who like to spend a lot of time there. And so we think that working with them is a really great opportunity to communicate some of the science of what we already know is happening out there.

Awesome. So you said that right now this smart fin, you you purchase it and install it in your board, and then you just built getting collecting data? Pretty

much yeah, so So we're, we're a little bit beyond what I'd consider the prototyping phase at this point, we've distributed 300 of them around the world. We have fairly global distribution at this point. Bunch in Australia bunch in Europe. I haven't actually seen any pop up in in Africa yet. But we do have some in in Asia. And yeah, so you can sign up at smartphone.org/contact and get on our mailing list for when we do our next distribution of fins, which we're hoping will be later in maybe the summer or fall of 19. And yeah, so it has wet dry sensor, it turns on automatically when it goes in the water. It knows to begin collecting data, it turns off when it comes out of the water and immediately begins looking for a cellular connection so that it can send data to the cloud. So all a surfer has to do is keep the fin charged and surf and they're able to contribute to coastal oceanography. So Phil,

how did you get started with the smartphone project or get introduced to it? Well,

when I was in grad school, I was spending a lot of time in the lab building these chemical sensors for pollution studies. And my my biggest focus was ocean acidification, which is the process of carbon dioxide dissolving in seawater and making it more acidic. There's extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere right now because of what's coming out of our tailpipes, our factories and so on. And so a lot of my work has been geared toward making carbon dioxide sensors and pH sensors. And I was also really interested in trying to communicate some of this work with local groups and Giving a bunch of peer tours. We have a an oceanographic research peer here at Scripps, giving a bunch of peer tours, lab tours and aquarium tours. And I found over a couple of years of doing this, that it was a really cool way to introduce people to the lab side of things. But it wasn't really a great way to connect them with the reasons that I got passionate about oceanography, the reasons that I got engaged originally, were just my love of the ocean and love of spending time outside. And so I thought if there was a way I could connect these two things, my actual work and my love for nature, that would be an even more powerful way to communicate this. And so I I asked my PhD advisor, if there was any way that I could take what I was doing in the lab out and do it in a coastal kind of more almost citizen science friendly way. And he was kind enough and or crazy enough to agree and let me take one of these $25,000 ph sensors, and ratchet strap it to the bottom of the standup paddleboard and, and watch me fail miserably. It didn't work, I fell flat on my face. Because the board didn't move, there was so much drag and so much weight on the board that it just, it was a mess. But he still supported me. So you know, keep going for it. We hired a mechanical engineer who redesigned the sensor housing so that it was more hydrodynamically friendly. We essentially then just were able to Velcro it to the bottom of the stand up paddleboard and get what we needed out of it that way. And so that was that was sort of phase one in graduate school. And then totally in parallel and separate from my work on on that project. There was this other group starting to work on the smartphone project about five years ago. And they got introduced to one of my colleagues and friends here at Scripps, Dr. Tyler Saranac, who's a postdoctoral researcher in coral reef chemistry. And he started evaluating the smartphone data and said, you know, this is a really cool project. But if if you guys if the smartphone project started working with the ocean sensor developers here at Scripps and combined forces, then this could be a really powerful project. And we could put the state of the art oceanographic sensors on this really neat communication and data collection platform. And so that's, that's when I got engaged about two years ago, a little over two years ago now.

So what kind of sensors is fin have?

Right now we have relatively simple sensors for temperature motion, just a an IMU, nine axis IMU, from which we're trying to extract the surfer motion, but also the wave motion when a surfer is just sitting out there bobbing, we want to be able to use this to reconstruct what the wave patterns look like, which is really helpful information both for the surfers but also for coastal oceanographers and communities trying to plan for coastal changes. And then it's all geo located. So GPS. And as I mentioned, my background is in chemical sensors. So I'm working on the next batch of sensors. pH is one of the next in the pipeline. Dissolved oxygen is a really big one. And really important for measuring how fish are literally breathing in and out and how phytoplankton are creating oxygen. And how bacteria are chewing up that oxygen. That gives us a really good understanding of ocean health. And then chlorophyll fluorescence for algae blooms turbidity for water clarity. And then people always ask me about water, like bacteria concentrations. Can you tell me if there's if I'm gonna get sick if I go in the water today? And we're not quite there yet? Those types of sensors are definitely coming online. But they're nowhere near small enough to fit in a surfboard fin. Yeah,

I imagine you would for that. You'd have to have like a, like a like a light and see the bacteria I guess. Yeah, yeah,

a lot of you're exactly right. A lot of these the sensor types are based off of fluorescence or fluorometry. measurements. So yeah, shining an LED measuring off a photodiode. Exactly.

Cool. So the the surfer that has one of these on their board? Do they have access to the data that they're collecting?

Yeah, absolutely. All of the data are freely open, available, accessible to anyone. we're revamping our data driven website right now working with this company up in Alaska called axiom data science. And they're doing an amazing job. Totally redoing everything. So for the past couple of years, everything has been freely available, but it's been a little bit hard to access. And we have a couple custom Python scripts that allow us to basically drill in and get aggregated data, but it's fairly painful. So we have this really nice new portal where everything's available. And then our vision is that after a surfer gets in from session, they will get some sort of mobile notification that says thank you for your contribution of let's say, you know, 120 minutes to science. Here's the link to view your session data and they can look at it Just that individual session data and then also look at it in the context of all the data being collected worldwide,

a little bit of a gamification of science, at least in data gathering, at least.

Absolutely, yeah. And we're working on other features to, to add to that, I guess, we really want to be able to provide some metrics to the surfer, as well, so that they can get a sense for maybe how many waves they caught, how fast they went during the session, things like that. We're not trying to be a Fitbit for the surfer. We're trying to be a Fitbit for the ocean, essentially. So I always, especially as an academic research, I have to prioritize the the sensor accuracy, precision, things like that over some of these gamification type things, but we realize that they go hand in hand because the surfers only going to use it as much as they feel rewarded by their participation in the project.

For sure, that was actually a question that I had. I mean, that of course, there's the there's the feelgood aspect of contributing to, to what the end result is, but at this, but you know, at some point, like the surfer themselves has to adopt this and put it in there. So So I was just curious, what what, I don't want to make it sound like there's like a transaction going on. But what did they get out of it is what I'm getting at?

No, you're absolutely right. I think you're, you're asking the right question there. And this is something we ask ourselves all the time, how, how do we inspire people to become more engaged. And right now we have a longer waitlist than we can possibly make sensors and smartphones to keep up with, which is a really exciting problem to have, of course. And we're going through this design for manufacturing process right now. So that we can figure out how to alleviate some of those, those bottlenecks. Or open up the bottlenecks, I guess. But yeah, the reasons that we think people would get engaged are, as I said, just love of the ocean, because they they're invested in ocean health themselves. And, and we believe a lot of people, for a lot of people, that will be enough, but then I do believe we'll have to reward people in certain ways and help create some competitions and help create some metrics that allow people to compare their data to their their buddies data, or, you know, I can imagine High School surf teams where we're people are actually, maybe even using some of the scientific data in science classes, if we can manage to pair up with high school surf team, coaches, as well as the environmental science teachers, or chemistry teachers, you know, some really neat things could could start to happen out of that.

Yeah, I could see that being a really great introduction to data gathering, and then having to write a lab report for something like learning in high school, like, go gather data, how do you do it? Well, go have some fun, you know,

that's the dream. Seriously, I would be so excited if I saw that happen. I think the idea of I give a lot of talks at high schools now about smartphone and some of my other research, and I didn't grow up with smartphones in the classroom, myself as a student. And it's just amazing to see how many people are just staring at their phones as engaging as I think I am. They're still just looking at other things. And my my dream for this project is where they're actually looking at their surf data on their phone. Even if they're not listening to me. ramble about some oceanographic phenomenon.

You could do like the next Angry Birds, but on a surfboard?

That's the dream. Yeah. Yeah.

Actually, is that is that so popular thing with the kids nowadays? Is even

you're getting old Parker, if you have to ask that question. So let's, uh, let's get into the manufacturing of this or, you know, I guess you could say the construction of it. So what I'm most curious about right now is, is what's the thickness of one of these fins? And what kind of constraints do you have to? Or are you given in order to shove all of this stuff into one of these things?

You're sort of leading with the the answer in your question there. It's thickness is the number one constraint, you're absolutely dead on the maximum thickness for a center fin. So for anyone who isn't a big surfer who's listening now there are side fins and short board fins, which tend to be a lot smaller. And then long boards and stand up paddle boards and some other other types of watercraft that might have a center or single fin. Those tend to be a little bit bigger. And so at the moment, we're, we have shortboard fin designs with the smartphone of the 300 that we've already distributed, probably 200 of them are short cord fins. But moving forward, we're actually thinking about focusing a little bit more on the longboard or center fin design. Because of this exact concern and thinking we can fit bigger batteries in there more sensors. And then there's this other really interesting thing that I keep running into as a scientist trying to use the data, which is that the data, the environmental data are only as good as the geolocation that we have for the data. Meaning if we're collecting a whole bunch of temperature data as a time series, but we don't have GPS points for each of those, then it's really hard to know how to interpret it. Other than with some, you know, means median type statistics. And so the reason that's important in selecting a fin design is that long boards and stand up paddle boards are bigger and therefore more buoyant, and get the fin closer to the sky closer to the satellites and get up to 25 times better GPS signal reception. And so that's 25 times more data that scientists can use. So this was one of the stranger data analyses I've done in my academic career, you know, board volume versus GPS fixed rate. But yeah, it's, it's been pretty fruitful as well, it's really helped us figure out what direction to go. And so, maximum thickness of a longboard fins only about eight millimeters. And that's really not a whole lot of space. Again, that's maximum thickness, these are foil, so it pretty quickly tapers off from from the eight millimeters and fitting a battery in there, it's probably the hardest part, especially lithium batteries that tend to swell a little bit over time, that that can be a major concern. And then getting some of the other like the pH sensors or a lot of pH sensors out there. There aren't a lot of small ones that perform well or well enough for oceanographers to care at least. So basically chopping away all the extra material that you don't need and trying to cram it in there. That's, that's one of my biggest challenges. And then I guess, to, to kind of keep rambling about the engineering concerns. The other big one is that we're trying to build something that doesn't just meet oceanographic standards, but also meet surfing standards. And that includes weight and flex and other other things. Obviously, the shape itself has to be dead on for a surfer to want to surf it and, and we've had the fins tested up at futures fins futures is one of the two biggest fin manufacturers in the world. And they've tested the fins for us and they say that we're in their, their ballpark of flex characteristics, weight characteristics, and we're actually using some of their foil designs and templates. So so we know we're we're dead on there and the world number one surfer for the for, I think two of the past three years, surfs futures fins have a similar design to what we're producing. So if anyone's complaining about performance, it's it's not our fault.

It's not their fault. They missed that wave. Exactly. Yeah. So on the battery is, what kind of is a lithium cell battery? It is like a flat pack? Yeah. Yep. So how do you keep that thing charged up? I assume it's not just a DC barrel jack that because it has to be waterproof.

Right? Right. Yeah. So in I hope it's waterproof. So do I. And, and it hasn't always been, but it seems to be now fortunately. So we're working on a couple of different designs for that we've we've had an inductive charger in the one that we've produced 300 of and just a flat a Qi charger. I believe it's pronounced Qi. I never know when I look at that, but the QI charging pads and that's worked quite well for us over the past couple of years. And so we have a custom charger unit that slides over the fin and that plugs into USB slides over the fin. Everything's fully enclosed in fiberglass and epoxy resin. So none of the electronics are actually exposed to seawater. That's that's one design. And then, more recently, we've actually started intentionally poking holes in the fin, so that contacts are in in touch with the water. The reason being that we want to know if the fin is wet or not. And so we have this wet dry sensor, that's just a it's a comparator circuit that is figuring out if the resistance is above or below a certain level, then it assumes it's wired or not. And decides what to do based off of that information either begin recording and recording transmit data. And so once we started poking holes in the fin, we decided well, we could go with a wedded USB charger as well. And then we have a USB switch in there that that cuts power off when it's in the water so has extremely low leakage and and really low corrosion and these pins are staying Unless steel, so this was actually one of the biggest engineering challenges I dealt with last year. I knew what metal to use, or a subset of metals to choose from, for this, but getting stainless steel to solder to a printed circuit board and figuring out how to how to make this a reasonably manufacturable product. That's that's taking a lot of time.

I've never heard I never heard of a stainless steel contact USB connector.

I just invented it I guess. That's cool.

Your your manufacturer that or

depends on your definition of manufacturing. I'm hand tapping and hand threatened knees and so no, no, we're not going to be factoring them yet. We were, as I said, we're going through this design for manufacturing process. And that's something we're working through at the moment. But But no, right now I'm using off the shelf stainless steel screws. I'm tapping them by hand.

I'm okay. I see what you're saying. Yeah, yeah. It's not a USB connector that we are thinking about. It's it's for contacts that you were pressing into, correct.

That's exactly right. Yeah, I left out the critical part there. So So your app makes way more sense. Yeah. Yeah, no, no known off the shelf USB, stainless steel connectors. That'd be awesome. I hope someone does actually invent that. That would make my life a lot easier. Yeah,

that sounds really expensive.

Yeah. But yeah, so then, on the other side, we have a charging unit that that attaches. Same thing just slides over the fin. You don't even have to pull the fin out of the surfboard. And then it has pogo pins on the charger side that line up with these stainless steel pins protruding out of the fin, and they're they're all filed and sanded down. So it's totally flush with the thin surface.

So this was like a fiberglass mold that you suspended your your circuitry in and then poured a resin on it.

Yeah, yeah. We're borrowing from standard surfboard and surfin manufacturing processes. A lot of the work in the surf industry is still done by hand. And we had a guy and manufacturing director who is making these in his actual garage, not some fictitious garage, he was he built some aluminum molds, some silicone molds, and, and tested a bunch of different ways of doing this. And yeah, landed on the epoxies, and the fiberglass thicknesses and the number of layers of cloth to use. And now I'm, I'm replicating that process in the lab. And conceptually, it's pretty straightforward. It's just laying out some fiberglass cloth on top of this mold, laying the electronics on top of that little more fiberglass cloth on top, and then close the mold, fill it with resin. And that the, as I said, conceptually not so, so painful, but dealing with bubbles is a bit of a pain and making sure that you actually have insulated all of the electronics as well as you think you have holding components in place. Things that that aren't rocket science to deal with, but, but just practically speaking a bit of a pain.

So you mentioned that the the fins flex a bit, has that been a problem with the electronics inside the fins? We

spend a lot of time worrying about that. And we're not sure that we've ever seen a failure that we can blame on flex or, or breakage, in that that sense. It's possible that there. I think we just don't have enough fins out there and enough data on this to answer the question properly. I guess that's always the scientists answer. We need more data. But But yeah, honestly, we, we, we worry about this a lot. And we haven't actually had known failures for this reason.

Cool, because yeah, that's the one thing Steve and I've talked about before is, ceramic capacitors don't like to be flexed at all. And they tend to fail catastrophically when they do right. Also also thin copper layers on FRFR board don't particularly like flex also. But actually, you know, that sort of brings up something that we mentioned earlier, with the with the flat pack battery swelling, potentially, if it's entirely encased in a hard resin, there's not much room for it to move. Has that been any kind of an issue for you?

So far, it's it's been an issue in that it causes a little bit of bulging so it actually pushes out the epoxy and fiberglass around it, which is sort of a signal of the end of life of that fin and that happens after about a year and a half and we think we can extend Have a lifetime by adding some sort of maybe a cushion or spring of sorts in between the fiberglass and the battery so that it can absorb a little bit more of that expansion before it has to be declared dead, I guess. Yeah, it's one of the harder parts about prototyping all this is that we basically have to go through from through the entire process. I guess before we know what works, what doesn't work, there isn't really we can't do all this testing until we have it in a fully glassed and finished and surfed fin.

Was there any other hardware challenges with designing this fin? We talked about the batteries, and then the getting sensors, the fit, but is there anything else?

Sure, I mean, I guess the entire outline of the surfboard fin is pretty small. And getting the best GPS signal possible requires pretty specific ground plane layout, and making sure that we maximize our ability to pick up GPS, while also staying within the constraints of the fin shape itself. That's been a bit of a pain. And then another thing that's more on the scientific side is that we want the the temperature sensor, or any sensor that we eventually have on there to have the fastest response possible to changes and so the epoxy is both an electrical insulator, but also of course, a thermal insulator. And so it's slowing that response time down. And and so basically smoothing out patterns that we would see in the ocean that could actually be really interesting for an oceanographer to you know, anyone who's who's swam in open water has felt those patches of cold and warm water. You're in there and

that's not just a big whale moving through.

Yeah, I get asked that all the time. Like, is this thing gonna be able to tell when I'm peeing in the water? Or when blame it on the whale whatever. In all seriousness, this this kind of stuff is actually important to oceanographers. Not whether or not whales are paying maybe that is true that's just not my field. But the idea of these these smaller patches of of cold and warm water help us understand small scale Eddie's and small scale Eddie's help us understand how nutrients are being brought to the surface from deeper waters and how those might lead to phytoplankton blooms and how those phytoplankton blooms might lead to fish population changes and that sort of thing. So and then in, in current contexts, or current events, one of the biggest issues we're seeing in in small scale variability is Coral bleaching as a result of increased temperatures over coral reefs. And quite interestingly, we don't see reefs bleaching uniformly meaning you might see what you think is one warmer water mass passing over a coral reef and expect that whole reef to bleach but multiple coral heads of even the same species on the same reef flat or roof terrace might not end up bleaching. And we suspect that there might be some smaller scale differences in in temperature and other characteristics that we just haven't had the technology to measure. So. So yeah, this response time thing has a lot of scientific relevance as well.

So one thing we haven't covered yet is why this platform why surfboard compared to something else, like a tower or or a bomb, or boat. Yeah, sure.

It's really everything we we want to put smartphones on everything, we want to put sensors on everything. And as I mentioned earlier, a lot of my work has been focused on on putting sensors on on other platforms, I mentioned, this big pH sensor, we put those on big ocean buoys that we deploy for upwards of a year sometimes just leave out there and let them do their thing. We've put put sensors on vessels, oceanographic research vessels and buoy or I'm sorry, piers and some other places. The reason we're focused on surfing for the smartphone projects, is because of the energy around surfing. And getting back to this communication of science issue that that we've talked about a little bit. The idea is that we we know a ton about the ocean and the environment in general, that we just haven't really communicated as a community all that well. And a lot of people use the the information deficit model where if you just tell people facts, then you know, it'll fill in their information deficits, they'll learn whatever they needed to learn, and then the world will be a better place because we taught someone, whatever, but that's not how people actually absorb information. And we think that by working With the surf community, which is generally a pretty positive community, and just a fun community to be a part of, and to work with, we think working with them provides us this opportunity to get the word out in a much more accessible way, a much more understandable and just a fun way. And, again, I mean, the surf community depends so deeply on coastal health that, that we we think there, there are just so many reasons to work with them. But then we do ultimately want to put put the sensors on everything that touches the water and get as many measurements as possible. The surf community is just a really great one to start with.

They're kind of like the hardcore users of that area. Exactly.

It's probably easier to get the early adopters with that. Right?

Exactly, exactly, yep. We get people who just really want to be involved because they care about it, they think it's a neat mission, they think it's a fun way to collect data. And yep, it's, it's a great way to, to get some publicity for it to, we're hoping to, to get some pros that either want to use the platform or even talk about it, because a lot of the pros are starting to get really engaged in coastal preservation and stewardship as well, which is really neat to see. So there's a lot of energy around this idea right now.

So if you're smo, Joe, how do you contribute to this project, or I guess Mojo surfer, I guess.

If you're a surfer, the quickest way to get engaged is our website, sparkfun.org. And then smartphone.org/contact, will give you access to a mailing list, that we don't send out all that much email. But we'll definitely be sending something out when we have the next big release of fins after this design for manufacturing process. And, and the actual manufacturing, of course. So that would be one way to get engaged. And then we're we're trying to get more on top of our social media game in general as well. And then we're just always looking for people to go out and talk about it as well. We think this is a really I gave a talk at a brewery two weeks ago, and at a science museum read before that, and it's a really fun thing for me to do. But if other surfers want to get out and talk about how they're getting engaged in coastal stewardship, and they don't have to talk just about smart Finn talk about anything related to coastal preservation. That would be just another fantastic way of of getting people involved.

So how can people contact you, Phil?

People can I think all my contact information should be available through smartphone.org. But my email address is just PJ Bresnahan at at UC San Diego or ucsd.edu. I don't know it as well as I should. ucsd.edu. So that's one way or I'm on social media as well. In situ file INSIT. You pH i Le

I've got one more question. It's not about the smartphone. So Steven, do you have anything?

Actually, okay, so So I have one question. This is purely just because I'm curious. What kind of accuracy are you looking for for things like pH and temperature?

Yeah, yeah, I'm I'm so glad you asked. This is this is really what I spent a lot of my time in the scientific realm thinking about. And on the temperature. So we're we're already achieving about point 05 degrees Celsius accuracy and precision plus or minus point oh five. And we're getting that by doing a secondary calibration against what we would consider almost a primary reference temperature sensor. So we're using this state of the art. I think it's $4,500 conductivity, temperature and depth sensor. It's the workhorse of oceanography, to measure salinity and temperature patterns across the entire depths of the ocean. And those are calibrated against NIST platinum electrodes and mercury, thermometers and whatnot. And so we we trust their accuracy to a really high degree, we're calibrating our smartphones, to those over a range of five to 30 C. And we've seen really great agreement and really great stability as well. So not seeing any drift and that calibration. pH is way way tougher. Because glass electrode pH drifts really quickly, like on the scale of days, and then is Fetzer. ANSYS select a field effect transistor, pH electrodes. Those tend to be extremely stable over long time periods and sea water. Which is great, but if you've unfortunately, if you take them out of seawater, they go through this reconditioning period every single time they go back in and That's what we're essentially asking people to do by taking them in and out of the water when they serve. So we might have to come up with some sort of like little sleeve that goes over it to keep it wetted in between, you know, just pouring a little seawater, beer or whatever to keep it wet conditions and ready to go for your next session.

Great. Oh, that was a really good question. And I got we got one that out because mine's a little silly question. Phil, what's your favorite surfer lingo? Or is that still a thing?

You know, I was about to say there's no such thing as a silly question. But no, you know, what, the one that keeps coming up, which is it makes me laugh at myself is stoke are stoked when I gave my first interview about it was a little bit before smartphone when I was doing the stand up paddleboard pH sensor thing. And it was just something that our department put together to talk about the project and put this really nice piece on on our web magazine. And it was the first thing I ever sent out to my family with with any kind of publicity for my work. And my mom called me up and she was like, that's a really nice piece. But did you actually say stoked, and I grew up just outside of Philadelphia, and this like old farm town that has since been converted to suburbia. And the idea of of saying stoked in a professional setting has just been, like, so foreign to me for my entire life. But actually, I like it. And this isn't as goofy as you might have hoped it would go but I think the the word stoke actually carries a lot of meaning in the work that we're trying to do. We're trying to stoke the conversation around climate change and environmental stewardship and, and all that and so, I'm sorry to turn your goofy question around to this serious topic, but you know, that's perfect. Also, to go back to the goofy, there's this website called the reactionary which, I it took me a long time to come across this, but it's it's like Wikipedia for surf lingo. And oh, that's great. It's pretty rad.

I gotta go there right now.

Yeah. There's some good stuff on there. I guess it's more like what is the urban dictionary but but for surf lingo, or for servers? I think it's safe for work though. No promises.

You got anything else? Even?

You know, I think I think I'm good.

Cool. So Phil, can you sign us out of the podcast?

That would be my pleasure. That was the macro fab engineering podcast. I was your guest Phil Bresnahan.

And we are your hosts Parker Dolan

and Steven Craig. Later everyone take it easy

Thank you. Yes, you are listener for downloading our show if you have a cool idea, project or topic. Let Stephen and I know Tweet us at macro fab at Longhorn engineer or at analog en je or email us at podcast at macro fed.com. Also, check out our Slack channel. If you're not subscribed to the podcast yet, click that subscribe button. That way you get the latest rap episode right when it releases and please review us wherever you listen as it helps us stay visible and helps new listeners find us cowabunga everyone