Welcome, everybody, to agn News. We have this week the rolling total of the coronavirus that has affected over 200 individuals. So please, we want to put alert out there. One, be safe, and two, order your shrimp local from Joe Shrimp Shopping Act. It's not worth importing shrimp. There's too much crazy stuff going on in the world. Make sure your shrimp are clean, healthy, local, and hand picked by Joe himself. Are you okay, Jim? We have an anchor down. Jim, are you okay?

I'm peeing myself over here. How many people we just offended?

I have no idea. But you can use promo code Aquarium Guys at checkout for 10% off corona free shrimp.

Corona free shrimp.

And then you can drink a corona while acclimating your shrimp.

Wow, that's incredible. You sat up all night long thing with that, didn't you?

We are not sponsored by corona.

No, not even a little bit.

But seriously, guys, check out Joe Shrimp shack.com. He does have a lot of great shrimp. He is in the metro of Minnesota. It's well worth a checkout 10% with aquarium guys. We appreciate it. And let's not forget our charity, Ohio Fish Rescue is the bomb diggity. They're the bomb diggity.

Bomb diggity.

They have not facing all this pain and suffering over their YouTube account, getting stolen and still dealing with Google. So please forgive them. They haven't been able to upload a video in a while, but instead, until then, they're doing content on Facebook. So go to their Facebook page for Ohio Fish Rescue to keep yourself updated on their content, and go to their website, ohiofishrescue.com. Give them a buck. Give them a call. Tell them you love them. Tell them let's kick that podcast. Welcome to the Aquarium Guys podcast with your host, Jim colby and Rob dolson.

Hey, everybody. how's it going out there in La la Land? We are coming live from you in central Minnesota. Actually, we're in northern Minnesota.

Yeah, it's cold enough.

Northern Minnesota. I'm sorry I lied to you again.

I feed outside and it froze. That's northern Minnesota.

What froze?

I don't feel anything anymore, so I'm.

Not sure that's best. Hey, who we got on this week?

Well, first of all, you have to introduce yourself.

I'm Jim colby.

I'm Rob Zulson.

And I'm Adam Almashar.

So this week, we have a special guest that, frankly, I was really lucky to get. So we had a prior guest. The guest canceled. That happens a lot. You try to set these up weeks in advance, and sometimes life happens. You get a cancellation. But I was able to land a, dare I say even better in it. So today we're going to do a technological podcast on computing and how to use actual smart controllers for an aquarium. And there is none better than Brandon. And what do you call your company? Is it leviathan? You're doing a kickstarter campaign. First, tell us your name and about yourself.

Yeah, well, thank you for having me on. First of all, not listened to a ton of episodes yet, but I've been a huge fan of what I have listened to. I'm excited to be here. The board itself is called leviathan, and it's essentially just a little postit note sized circuit board that can take all sorts of different sensors and give outputs for things like light control or dosing, take inputs for things like PH sensors and temperature sensors, plugs onto a reef pie and basically keeps my tank running pretty much maintenance free until I have to do a water change.

So I just saw jimmy's eyes glaze over, so forgive him. All right?

What the hexa reef pie to explain this.

Right? It is a small not what you think, Jim. Right. It is delicious, but don't even I.

Really want to hear what he thinks it is.

I thought it's never mind.

You got to tell tell us now.

He goes reef pie. I'm just thinking, like, are you throwing in, like, some chocolate pie or some hair? No, I can't see it.

You got to eat before we do podcast. All right? Frankly, your blood sugar crashes and you get crabby.

I'm just going up. What is that? Explain it to me.

So the idea is, the Reef Pie project uses what's called a raspberry pie, not the food. A Raspberry pi is a tiny credit card size full desktop computer, but they use for small applications, just making shit up. It's like a $35 computer. It's just about the size of a credit card. You can plug stuff into it. I have a couple at home, and you use them to automate little things. This is how they first started the Smart Tools. They put a little Raspberry pi in them before they built the product. It's a fun little do it yourself, really cheap computer. And the goal of the Raspberry pi was to make sure that anybody can afford a computer in the world. They have special software that turns this little computer, the Raspberry pi, into a super smart controller for your aquarium.

You're just making shit up.

No, don't quote me on this because you'll have a whole list for us, and we're going to deep dive into this later. But it controls lighting, it controls micronutrients. It's an entire controller for computers. So we'll get into that.

So it controls everything?

It does.

Kind of like my ex wife.

So, Brandon, I'm sorry I didn't bring.

Her up last week, and you told me I did. You said you can't bring up your ex wife anymore.

I mean, she's getting offended. She's going to put in a cease and desist on us. That's what's going to happen.

I don't care.

So, Brandon schreiber I didn't even do your full name. My apologize. Is that how you pronounce it?

Yeah.

Perfect. That's one of the few times I've heard anyone pronounce it right.

Excellent. We have a lot of these weird sh names in Minnesota. We have a lot of germans.

Yeah. So we just want to let you know that your name is weird.

Your name is in it.

I've heard z's. I've heard plenty of different ways of pronouncing it.

We normally like to spend the first ten minutes offending our guest.

Absolutely.

Here we go.

I mean, you called peyton a Nazi in one of your episodes, so I just figured it's par for the course I might have.

Yeah, that's true.

That was the episode I just got done listening to.

Yeah, thanks for bringing that up.

How dare you not start an episode.

One, we tell everybody that in order to listen to story time, you have to listen to everything up to story time, because you don't deserve story time.

Story time is from story time.

You haven't got that yet.

Oh, he did. It was from a different oh, I did.

I did start with that one.

Yeah, see, you ruined it all.

I did. We'll get into that whole conversation here in a bit, but we have some cleanup. So this last month, right, since Christmas, people have been seeing leaks online of these newt glow betas. Right? They're just like the glow fish, but it's a glow beta because they cannot stop themselves from changing all of our fish into neon disco ball aquarium creatures. So if you've ever been online or gone to some subreddits, some aquarium forums, the number one most complained about fish that is abused is the beta. It's because betas are super hardy individuals that do not require a lot of oxygen in the water. They get put in cups, and over the years, they have been definitely hardly abused in the aquarium trade since then. I mean, it went from chipping betas on wet paper towels to actually now getting their own individual bags and cups. So it's gotten better over these? Absolutely, yeah.

Holy shit.

Back in the day, they used to ship betas. They would lay a layer of wet paper tall, they'd throw 20 betas on there, they'd lay another piece of wet paper tall, and they would ship them like that. Back in the day when I was seven.

Live rock better.

Yeah, absolutely.

Now they do individual, they're about 2oz of water in a bag and they can live in there up to seven or eight days. But that's inhumane. I mean, you got to get them out of there and you got to get them fed. But when beddas are shipped in about the size of a flat case of pop, they'll put 300 beds in there.

So we at the aquarium, guys podcast have been trying to keep up with this, because all of these internet forums, all of these groups, they're oversensitive to the abuse that has been going on for generations with betas. You know, betas originally called the fighting fish, because two males will easily fight in small containers and they like cock fights in other countries they use to fight against each other to almost the death or the death just for gambling purposes. So there's been a long history of beta abuse. So all of these websites, they recommend five gallon tanks for these betas. They recommend have to have heat. And they're always super sensitive of people of using betas. So, of course, by the time we get to glowfish, now they're doing betas. There has been the most insane uproar I have ever seen on aquarium forms and heard from different wholesalers that we have to at least talk about it. So we have insider information because, again, we have friends of the industry. We will leave people's names out of it, but we have information on the betas. Please share with us.

Jimmy well, with these betas now, the uproar that the backlash they're getting already about the betas is unbelievable. They said it's probably ten to one compared to what it was just for the regular glow fish. From what I understand, I believe the petcos of the world are going to have them first, and they're going to be available for 30 days only at petcos. They kind of have their, what do you call that, exclusive. Right. Exclusive launch there. And then you'll slowly see them creep into other stores and stuff, but nobody's really in a hurry to bring them in, to be honest with you. And from what I understand, from talking to several different people, even the usda is really slow to try to get these things passed through. Each color has to be inspected and paperwork done and payment made to the usda to get it approved. So a red one has to have.

I don't know how many pages of paper, separate filings.

Yeah.

Then the green one, then the yellow one, then the orange one, and so on.

And that's why you see these things when they first come out, you only see one color. And I don't know, we've heard up to four colors of bedded so far.

Rob'S the only thing I've confirmed is for four colors that I've heard of. And when I say confirmed, like three people try to sneak pictures, and it's hard to tell if these things are photoshopped because you're looking at a neon fish. They all look fake.

Right.

But it's rumored to have the four colors, which is the yellow, orange, red, and green.

Okay. There's a whole lot of backlash and stuff. So you're going to see these things. We've been seeing stuff with petco where they're doing great fanfare and saying globetas are here, are coming, or whatever. But from what I understand from everybody else is that it's going to be slow coming from all the other stores. So if you hate them or love them, it's just going to be a while. It's going to be interesting to see what happens.

Well, this week I have a story. Right. Got to tell, because Jimmy is going to make fun of me. So I've been working on this aquarium rack of my own. I have 910 gallon aquariums that I'm all trying to cycle together, right? So I'm working with pvc piping, and I decide that Jimmy shows me exactly where to cut all tips and trays. And then he leaves. And I get super poisoned on glue fumes and screw up on the whole thing. I start getting symptoms. I got to call the poison control hotline.

It was hilarious.

My roommates are quarantining me to certain rooms to make sure I don't drive and kill myself.

So what happened? rob's called me, and Rob will be the first one to admit that he's not really a hands on guy, but he is willing to learn. And I said, I'll come over and show you how to glue pvc together. You have to put a purple primer on first, and then you have to put on the glue. But I said, you're going to want a vent. If you have bathroom we're doing it down in his basement. Said, if you have a bath bathroom fan, make sure you turn that on. So he sucks some of the fumes under. He goes, I don't have one. I said, well, good luck to you. And I help him glue the first five or six pieces. And rob's down here. Gluing. He gets himself so loaded up on fumes that he freaking starts gluing stuff on backwards.

I am jack 211. I'm not even lied to you. After I got to like the last couple of pieces, I literally lost my motor skills and just had to lay on the floor.

Tell me what else happened.

So after laying on the floor, I'm just sitting there laughing. I have nothing to laugh at, but I'm just laying on the floor. I can't really move that well. Just laughing. Finally tried to air out. Like my roommates started putting on masks. They open up windows.

What else happened?

And then I broke an aquarium because I was high.

And then tell what happened.

And then I broke another aquarium because I was high. I was done that night. I was over with life.

They were both empty.

Yeah, one of them was not really empty. It just kind of hit the floor.

And I called him later. I said, how are you feeling? Not feeling very good.

All the hangover.

And I said, did you get sick? He goes, I kind of got the diarrhea. And so that's why I was trying to get him to see Rob. Got the diarrhea from the fumes.

Well, afterwards, looking at the Poison Control Holland information, paint fumes and all these, like, chemical fumes, that is one of the first hard symptoms that you're full on poison.

Oh, yeah.

It's no joke.

Loose, incredibly loose stools.

Oh, it's a joke. When you live two doors down and you're not here, it's pretty funny.

He's the guy that if you get stung by a lionfish, he'll be like, that sucks, doesn't it?

Yes.

Send me a picture.

Exactly right.

So anyway, so Rob got this done, and then he broke some more aquariums. And so now I've drilled, what, two or three more aquariums for him, the things I hate to do most. And one of our listeners sent us a great piece of advice, which I use today. And he says, when you're drilling the tanks, put some tape over it, like masking tape or duct tape, and that will help hold it together so you don't have a crack. And I didn't do it on the first one, which I cracked, but the second one, I did it, and it worked great. So thank you for that little bit of information.

How do you cool the bit when you're drilling the holes?

Well, what we like to do is we take plumbers push, and we make a big oval around it. Then we pour water in there.

It's a little pool of water at all times, the drill spins in, and.

So it spins in. And what's kind of nice is you have to kind of keep hitting it a little bit at a time. And when you pull out, the water spinning, and it will take out all the old glass fragments and whatnot, and it kind of spews it off to.

The side just to make sure it goes in your feet and hands.

Right? Yeah. So when you get done, you end up having a whole bunch of little tiny glass shards, which is kind of like having insulation. I don't know if you ever handled insulation, but you'll end up with, like, little fiberglass slivers in your arm and stuff. So it's kind of the same thing. You got to be kind of careful. But we only probably out of his nine tank system. We probably only broke nine tanks or so total right out. And I want to say that Rob won that one. I didn't crack as many as he did.

This is true. You're significantly better at drilling than I am. So on other news, we'd like to announce that we will be at the 2020 Aquarium Expo in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is going to be March 21, 2020, not 2021. Jimmy wanted more time, but nope, it's this year.

Let's just see it.

Right? So certainly come down to see us. We're going to have a press booth. We might do a podcast down there. We're unsure. We're at least going to try to get some interviews. And above all else, we want to mingle with our fans. I mean, that's what it's all about.

Do we have fans?

Yes, I do. You just have people that call you Arnold.

Yeah, I hear that I should go on discord and defend myself, but they're all crazy people on discord, so fingers crossed.

All three of us should be there and maybe a couple of our wives. So come bring your aquarium guys T shirts. Jimmy won't have a marker to sign your butt.

Yeah, no, I'm not doing that. I'm going to be tattooing people's foreheads.

I mean, free of charge, of course. foreheads, butts, it's whatever the fans want. Jimmy, you don't have a choice in this.

Oh, yeah, that's what I'm saying.

But only if you're hot. If you're ugly, you don't get your butt signed. That's how this works.

Wow. So we've offended all the people with Coronavirus. Yeah. And all the people with unsexy butts so far? No.

We just told them that they don't need chrono virus and they should get their shrimp locally.

They should get locally.

So I think that's it for news. I think we had a couple of emails, but we'll keep addressing them as they come in.

Hey, I got some news.

Do you?

So I finally got those balls sent out.

I thought you're going to say you save money about your current by switching to geico, all that lizard.

I wouldn't do business with the lizard.

This is why people aren't messaging me anymore, saying, where's my plants?

After all the plants have left the building. And they should have them here by the end of the week. So they are mailed today, and this is what day is Tuesday. So this goes out on Thursday. So they should have them by the end of the week.

Fantastic. So if you see a little baggy of plant matter, it's not your weed dealer.

It's not your weed dealer. And anyway, there might be some free Coronavirus in there. You never know.

Did people make fun of SARS like this?

I don't know.

I don't remember.

The reason we're everybody making fun of it because it's corona, like beer.

If they could name it something serious, it wouldn't be. But I'm seeing all these, like, corona beer memes everywhere.

I heard corona was paying $1 million to try to get bud Light virus renamed.

Their scientists on it right now.

You know what they do. Yeah. If you're suffering from coronavirus. I'm sorry. I'm going on a cruise here.

Yeah, that's the reason why we're bringing this all up is because we're making fun of Jim.

Yeah. I'm going on a cruise here shortly, and everybody's making fun of me. I've been getting the cruise lines, been sending us nonstop information saying they're bringing on an extra 100 people just to clean the ship up before oh, you're so getting sick.

That's because you took a dump in the punch.

No, I did not. This cruise would happen, though, because this is a pretty crazy cruise. We got in trouble. We got a little bit of trouble a few years ago when this cruise that we go on is a rock and roll cruise.

Monsters of Rock tour. Correct.

Right. Yeah, monsters of Rock.

So if you want Jimmy to autograph something there, see him at the monsters of Rock Tour.

That's right, manchester's. A rock crew is 45 bands from the 80s. Bands like tesla, Night ranger, Led a Ford, all that type of music bands.

That they're going to be playing here in another 25 years. In nursing homes?

In nursing homes, yeah. Or your local casino for a nickel. But God, you guys just suck, you know? Why don't you put on some backstreet Boys right now? Listen to that, you crack little crack.

No, I have to do some editing. Thank you.

I lost my shit regardless.

How did you guys get in trouble on your last cruise?

The last cruise Lita Ford was playing, lita Ford is wearing chaps and a thoughtless chaplas. Chaps. Is there chaps with asses in? I've never seen one.

But anyway, you clearly go to the wrong places.

So anyway, as we pull up in port in the bahamas, there's two Disney cruises, one on each side where these boats are 100 foot long, 1500ft long.

And each boat got the bad side of the chaps.

Yeah, exactly.

Oh, no.

And so we're parking in between two Disney cruises.

And they're not just Disney cruises. I'm assuming like I'm trying to paint the picture here in my mind. No, it's families.

It's children families. And if you've been on any of these ships or you've seen Disney cruises, they have a huge screen up on top where they show movies for the kids and stuff. So we pull in at 10:00 in the morning. Everybody in our boat is lit up like Christmas trees. And Lita Ford, as we come in.

Were you huffing pvc glue?

No, but we were in the bahamas, so you could about imagine what was being huffed on that right boat. So as we pull up, Lita Ford looks at the sound guy and says, Turn it up. And so we come in like every 16 year old kid into the school parking lot with with the with a bait, you know, just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And she is screaming and singing one of her songs. And so all of a sudden, you see all these children from the other crew. You know, they're only parking like 40 yards apart, and they can hear us. And you see small children coming on both sides going, what's that, mommy? leda Ford is just shaking her butt. And she gets all done, and all the moms and dads are sitting there going, what kind of cruise is this? Lita Ford says, let's give them the mantras, a rock salute. And I'm not kidding you, 200 and 5300 people per side went over and mound everybody. I'm just trying to imagine that trial and mound, everybody.

I'm just trying to imagine, like, 300 middle aged individuals with Harry brinkley Liver Award.

Middle Aged Liver Award bottoms. Yeah.

Is not the youngest person anymore.

Oh, no.

Leader Ford looks good. She's saying good. The audience mooning like 300 of these people mooning a boat full of children and having Donald Duck give you the middle finger.

Donald Duck did not give us the middle finger, I would have broke it. So, yeah, they were really impressed when we pulled in. Actually, it wasn't even three years ago. My wife's boss was on a cruise, and apparently we mooned their boat, too.

And there's got to be some pictures on the Internet. So the story is for you, listeners. Number one, if you want to see us in a family friendly adventure, come to Minneapolis Aquarium Expo March 21. And if you want to see Jimmy Trash mooning children, go to the monsters of Rock Cruise, and he will autograph something on you.

No, I kept my pants on. I did not moon anybody.

That's because Jim serves schools.

What?

With bread.

Oh, that's right. Bread.

We got to think about my full.

Time gig is that I work for a bread company, and I deliver bread to you're.

A bread hustler walmart.

Different. And to the schools, and they love me there.

Got to get that dough.

Yeah. God, you're good.

I like this guest. Can you keep him?

He's on fire tonight.

All right, guys, before we kick in, we're going to do the interview here with Brandon.

Oh, we're not done.

I got to cut you off, man. We got stuff to cover in my interview.

Oh, that's right. We have a guest on there.

We have a guest on tonight. So before we kick off, if you like what you hear and want to support the show, number one, support our sponsors. And number two, if you'd like to donate in sports directly, go to aquariumguyspodcast.com. On the bottom of the website, you'll see a donate link. You can donate one time, month to month. Every bit supports the podcast to help get new equipment and find these great guests.

And pay for cruises.

Does not pay for cruises. Are we going to put some lead.

Of Ford right here?

No.

Yes, we should put some lead of Ford right here.

I mean, what about backstreet Boys?

I never want to hear say I.

Want it that way.

No, nobody's that gay.

I'm sorry. He's from an older school. So, Brandon, how are you?

I'm always put some in sync in, too.

Yeah, I'm doing great.

All right, Brandon, now are you okay? We need to get this to an educational point of the podcast here, so.

We should start a few hours earlier.

Let's take this down and let's start with what aquariums do you have?

Well, I just have the one. I'm in a one bedroom apartment, which is pretty limiting on space. I've got a 55 gallon reef tank off in the corner in my living room. I would like to have more, but yeah, I also like things like beds and couches.

Everything in time again. Live rock, full on. Mix coral. Or is there a certain specialty you have in your aquarium?

Mostly soft? Yeah, I have a couple of easier to keep, hard ones, like the candy cane, those kinds of things. Mostly things like zoa is perfect.

Now, what got you into this whole controller hobby?

I'm lazy.

Welcome to the podcast.

Yeah, I just have always had an interest in electronics in general, and I like home automation stuff. I realized my first job when I moved to knoxville, I would travel out of town anywhere from four to 14 days at a time, and leaving a reef aquarium alone without even an auto top off for 14 days doesn't end well, as I found. So, yeah, I figured I needed to find a way to fix that, and I wasn't about to pay 800,001, $200, whatever an apex is to do it.

Essentially, that's the name in the game if you want to have your saltwater. And the saltwater tanks are the ones that people want to begin to automate because they forget so many more things than fresh, you have to do, especially reef tanks, micronutrients in the tank, and you have to continually test for it. So unless you're going to not forget every day, you're going to have something go wrong in a reef tank. And it's not because it's more difficult. It just takes a little bit more effort. So trying to automate that apex is the name of the game. Even when we went to see sean, he had some apex units, large apex units for micro dos, lots of them.

I don't have sean money, unfortunately.

Yeah, neither do we.

Everything in time.

So how long do you leave when you're gone? I mean, how long have you been running from the law? I'm just wondering.

About three years now, but I probably shouldn't go into that. This is probably going out live, right?

How long have you been running for the law now?

How long do you leave your aquarium unattended?

About two weeks is my max that I've done. I get pretty antsy any farther than that. Even with this going, I trust it. I haven't had anything go wrong with it in the entire, I guess, three years now I've had it running. But still, two weeks is a long time for something to be wrong in there. Unfortunately, it can't fix stupidity, like unplugging a return pump for a water change and leaving it unplugged, which I've done.

We've all been there.

Oh, yeah.

Well, essentially what you've done, then, with a reef tank is when you leave a freshwater aquarium, you have an automatic feeder, and you have the two weeks, and then you have to do a water change. So essentially, you've matched a reef aquarium's time where you could be away from it to a freshwater, which is pretty incredible, using a controller.

Yeah, freshwater is where I started, and I definitely missed the simplicity of it. I like all of the different options of fish and coral and all that cool stuff, but I don't like being tied to the tank. Yeah, like you said, every day, dropping little drops of calc water in, pouring. A couple of cups of water in there to top it off after it evaporates. It's pretty time consuming to take care of one manually.

So tell us about reef pie itself. Now, reef pi is the software that you use to control your aquarium.

Yeah. So Reefpie is a free open source software that a guy named ranjib Day put together who's far more technically advanced than I am when it comes to software. I dabble in a few different things, but I want to get into more of the reef pie development once the leviathan kickstarter winds down. But for now, I'm more focused on the hardware side of it. But Reef pie, what it does is sets up an ecosystem on the raspberry pi that you had mentioned earlier to where all of the individual input and output pins on there. It tells that, hey, this pin is going to be a temperature sensor. Translate those millibolt readings to a temperature that the person can read, or hey, this output sensor is going to an outlet and turn that pump off at 02:00 in the evening, those kinds of things. So it just really gives it a visual representation of what's going on inside of that little micro computer, gives you a way to interact with it without knowing code.

So a lot of people have used individual automation in their tank over time, like Apex that does micro dosing. Then you have a lot of these expensive light units, which you control from your phone or bluetooth that can adjust spectrum or put something on a cycle. Then you have certain types of heaters that can regulate and adjust temperature based on either time of day or certain cycle. They're smarter heaters. And you have all of these pieces individually, but not one system that controls everything. And that's essentially what this is doing, correct?

Yeah, everything you just named there, the leviathan can do the light control. It has a ten volt pwm output, basically the way Led lights work to dim or brighten them. It's not actually like a typical bulb where you're just feeding at less voltage. It maintains the same voltage level, but it sends little tiny bursts of voltage to it. So leviathan can control the length between those bursts. Sorry, I'm going more in detail than I need to, but everything you mentioned there, it definitely does and has the capability of doing.

So what are the list of features? Because we've heard a couple of different ones, but there's a long list that these things can do. So I'm going to name a few and I'd love you to add to it. Number one, it does temperature control, which we've talked about. It monitor it, and it can turn the heater on and off. It can do auto top off. So you have a little sensor and then motor to turn on and off, essentially a hooked up faucet that you would have to your tank to top off. The tank from either a reservoir or just fresh off the tap. You have a light controller that can not only allow you to control it, but automate certain spectrums of light at certain times of day. So you can completely simulate the whole morning, noon, afternoon and night cycles.

Yeah, with the kessels, you can actually control the spectrum and intensity of it, so the color, temperature, and how bright it is.

So it's literally like you're essentially emulating the real world. And PH monitors, they have micro dosing to monitor the micronutrients into it. What else could there possibly be that is so much?

I'd say the main thing that you miss is actually the heart of the system, which is the equipment control, where it can control different outlets for the pumps, heaters, lights, everything that runs off of a typical wall outlet. You plug that in and it controls relays where you can set them on timers. You can set up pretty advanced custom macros for them. So I have let me just pull my system up right here. I have a macro called Feeding, where instead of me having to go under my tank, unplug heaters and pumps, or manually switch them off or anything like that, I have just one button I can click where I run my feeding program and it turns off any pumps skimmers heaters that might wind up overheating once they go dry out of the water. My auto top off, turns that off. Anything that you don't want running during a water change, it handles all of that, leaves it off for a while, and then turns it back on after 20 minutes. So if I forget to turn all of that stuff back on manually, it'll say, hey, Brandon was an idiot, let's take care of that so the tank doesn't die.

So it'll either send you an alert or turn it back on manually for you if it's plugged in.

Yeah, the macros, they'll do it on their own. There actually is an alert system built into reef pie for any of your sensor input. So you can get alerts for so that your temperature went above a certain level, PH below those kinds of things.

So does it send like a message to your phone or an email?

Yeah, it sends an email. And there's also another feature in reef pie that I personally haven't used, but adafruit, I don't know if you're familiar with the site, but it's a pretty popular electronics hobby site. They have their own ecosystem, kind of for smart homes, smart stuff, basically, that they handle notifications. I don't know if it sends it via text, email, something, but yeah, there are multiple different ways it can notify you that something's wrong.

So again, ada Fruit, just to give you guys a little more background, it's the essentially automation DIY mecca site for a lot of different things. For people like yourself that love to make their own automation, that don't exist yet. So if you want a coffee pot that brews yourself a coffee, you can build your own and connect it to ada Fruit. So it gives you push notifications to your phone. So what this whole thing does is allows you to have this awesome controller and then notify everything directly to your phone or even set up. Like I believe they have text message controls as well. So Jimmy that decides that he's going to plug a pump for a while while he's feeding, doesn't plug it back in, would suddenly have an alert on his phone saying, you're an idiot, go plug it back on.

That's incredible. I'm just sitting here. I'm just blown away from because I'm the old guy on the podcast, this stuff just blows me away when he said that it automatically will turn it back on after 20 minutes. I mean, how much money did that just save you because you didn't cook something or the pump didn't go on and something died. But I know the question on everybody's lips are, and I'm going to ask it, it's the bowl in the room here. I'm going to ask it, can I connect that to my Christmas trees so the lights go on? That's what everybody wants to know. So you can actually run other items in your smart home like you just said. So you think you can eventually have everything in your smart home plus your aquarium all on the same thing?

Yeah, the limitation of the Raspberry Pi is that it has 40 input and output pins.

Incredible.

So you can't necessarily run an entire house, factory, anything like that, off of one pie. There are little chips that you can add on and the Leviathan board actually does have pca breakout board that can turn one bus into 16, but that starts to get into more advanced stuff. But I've talked to people that have got one of the Leviathan boards that aren't planning on using it for an aquarium. I've talked to one guy that's going to be using it for an aquaponics grow up. He has I definitely need to meet up with him at some point.

Is he in Colorado?

I'm not sure. He could probably be the right decision. Yeah, I've talked to him. Really cool use for it. I know a couple of people that are planning on using it for home brewing. I'm going to set one of those setups together as well. Got some mead brewing to my right here and kind of worried about how it's going to turn out because there's nothing really monitoring it. So I'm going to be terrible.

Let's talk about the actual Leviathan. So we talked about the software that does it. The software for the reef pie is what does the controlling and that's already done. So it can do all of these alerts off of one software. But what you did is you essentially made a custom little computer that you call the Leviathan. It's based off of the Raspberry Pi we talked about earlier, and it's about the size of what I'm trying to see the pictures here. There's no banana next to it.

It's the exact size of a standard Post it note, three by three inches.

So it's a Post It note little circuit board. And when it's all said and done, what you want to do is build this into a box. And essentially it looks like just so you can use any color. So we'll say a white box that has I'm seeing an example here. Yours has eight different power plugs. So that's a total of 16 individual power outlets. My question is, when you see this, essentially people will relate this to a power strip.

Exactly.

So when you have something that's plugged in, one of the biggest things that they have is equipment failing. Can you predict equipment that's going to fail or beginning to burn out before it actually burns out?

It doesn't really have a way to monitor that. I think the only way you'd really be able to do that is for some equipment, like a heater or pump, that would be drawing fairly measurable amount of amperage. And if you had a way to measure how much current that piece of equipment is drawing, over time, you might be able to flag, hey, this piece of equipment is drawing twice to amps. It usually is something. There's nothing built into reply.

To do that, you're going to have to do a Leviathan two to get this out for the next edition, I'm.

Definitely building a list of features to incorporate down the road. This was a long, drawn out project, so I don't know how many years down the road a Leviathan 2.0 would be, but I definitely want to revisit it at some point once I get some other projects out of the way.

Now, Brandon, what is your background? I mean, you have to be pretty smart to put this together the way it looks. I mean, I'm thinking, I couldn't do this. There's no way.

Well, I went to school for chemical engineering and realized about junior year, I hated chemical engineering, but it's good to.

Get two or three years in first before you figure out what to do. I don't know.

Yeah, I did take an elective, circuit 101. No, I don't hate chemical engineering. It's just nothing I could see myself doing over the long run. It was all very heavy, math intensive stuff. Designing systems, sizing them up, scaling them down, those kinds of things. And I'm more of a hands on person. I like to build and do things myself rather than having someone out in the factory do it. So the circuit design, those kinds of things really appealed to me. So I kind of started down that route in my personal time in school. And my first job out of college was at a nuclear research firm. They dealt with nuclear controls.

Wait, question.

Here we go.

So right off the reel, there's two famous things, right, for nuclear publicity stunts. One was the alert that a nuclear plant was going to go up. Someone clicked the wrong thing and everybody got alerts on their phone. And then the big one was it a few years back, someone clicked the wrong button and said there was missiles coming in Hawaii.

Oh, yeah.

So we're going to blame you now.

It's important.

Behind the first one, I didn't have anything to do with Hawaii.

So yeah, if you'd like to tell us your personal phone number and so we can broadcast it so I could call you and make some something bad goes on.

You need that before or after my social?

Yeah, well, we need your social security number and your first nine digits of your credit card.

It's 8675-3090 we should play that one right here.

Jenny. Jenny.

You got it. Sorry we interrupted you. Please continue off the rails.

Absolutely fine. And what I'm doing right now, I'm guess engineer for bosch, they have an appliance wing, bsh. So I build and program little automated fixtures for testing their appliances. So a lot of the stuff I've learned through Leviathan helped me get that job. And a lot of the stuff I've learned at work has helped me with what I'm working on in my own time.

You're my new best friend.

I wish I knew you like a month ago because I just bought a new bosch dishwasher.

Oh, man.

And I sat there to hook this thing up. It was like trying to shoot off nuclear submarine missiles or something. It took me quite a while, but I got it put together and man, the bosch. If you're out there looking for a dishwasher this is sponsored by bosch, by the way.

No, it's not.

But it's the quietest dishwasher I've ever had. And that's kind of their thing.

It's quiet dishwasher.

It is.

They are just the bounds above the competition.

They are the cadillacs of dishwashers. And I'm at that point in my life where I'm sick and tired of buying the same crap over and over. And when we bought our dishwasher said, I don't care what you spend, honey, but I don't want to buy another one in five years.

I swear to next Thanksgiving when I'm at your house and I see like a little food chip in the corner, I'm going to call Brandon and harass him.

Yeah, like you'll be invited next year.

No, I'll tell you, it's weird when appliance knowledge will come up like that. I ran into an older lady outside of my apartment complex a few months ago wandering around on a Sunday. Just tell something was wrong. So I kind of asked her, hey, is everything okay? She was headed to our leasing office because her stovetop had been stuck on for hours. I said, yeah, the burners are turning white and the apartment is getting hot, and I don't know what to do. I tell her, well, unplugged, the leasing office is closed. Since it's sunday. But I know a couple of things about ovens. Because that's the division I work in. So I head upstairs, get my multimeter and bag of tools and stuff.

And the moral performed surgery.

I'm sorry, what was that?

Now?

The moral of the story is you're looking for new housing.

Yeah.

Tell us the rest of the story. Keep going.

Yeah. I was ready to perform surgery on this oven. And I get up there, and the knobs on our stoves in the apartment, they're not very indicative of what mode they're in. And she had hers turned 180 degrees, thinking it was off, but it was pointed towards, like, medium, I guess.

So she had them on wide open?

Yes. And she was convinced it was off, so I came to save the day by turning them off.

So what he's saying is that was a long tangent. It was the most earned worthy originals he's ever got. To an old lady for fixing a stove.

Those hard strawberry candies Are to die for.

There you go.

All right, so back to the leviathan. So, again, when it's all set up, it looks like a box, essentially, that looks like a power strip on your kickstarter campaign. Again, what you're doing is you've created the board to build these on your own. So if someone wants to take your DIY project, they can buy the board directly from you. Because, again, that's a really easy to use board. And you have all these downloads that you can go in your 3d printer. And you can either print off pieces, or you can manufacture your own out of wood. And it gives you instructions on how to build exactly the control you're looking for. So if jimmy's only looking for a heater monitor. For a couple of accessories, his filter and his light, he can just build that. If someone like me, I'm going to want water flow. I'm going to want micronutrients salinity and maybe the heater. We can just build just what you're looking for. And putting exactly the money you want into your controller.

What if I'm lazy and I don't want to make anything? I just want him to send me one?

Then you can go right directly to your kickstarter campaign. And it looks like you still have it up where you have different selections. Can you tell us some about your kickstarter campaign right now?

Yeah, let me pull that tab up. Well, I guess what I'm doing, like you said, there's all sorts of range of where you can back the project, starting at just $14 for the bareboard itself. Do you know how to solder? I highly recommend that one. Because really, at the end of the day, the reason I put leviathan out there is to save people money and time on their reef. Pie builds the do it yourself from scratch build that ranjib recommends on his ada Fruit Guide has you buying five different proto boards from ada Fruit, and that purchase alone is $25. They're not prewired set up. They're just generic boards with holes, and you have to put on hundreds of jumper wires for those. Or you could get Leviathan board that doesn't have the things on there yet for 14, about half the price.

You should see Jimmy's face. Jimmy doesn't even like cutting glass on aquariums. He's just looking like, man, you guys get a lot of time in your hands.

Are you going up from there?

You're single, aren't you?

I'm not.

You're not?

He's a taken man.

Is he a taking man?

He's got that bosch money.

That's right. Who's that bosch money. I'm just going, who's letting you play in the playroom too long, I tell you that.

Yeah, my wife's in the other room asleep right now. The last few weeks have been a little rough with as much time as the Kickstarter has taken up, but she likes the tank. She has definitely helped me out a lot with it. Cutting wires, sorting out resistors, those kinds of things. But, yeah, I'm sure she's absolutely sick of hearing about it, but she's definitely really supported me throughout it.

Well, that's fantastic. I'm sure she's glad that you got somebody else to talk to. Now.

Again, back to the point.

If you're Jimmy, an entire podcast of.

People, hey, what is your website? Because people are asking, what is it?

We'll actually have it in the show notes because it's a Kickstarter campaign right now.

I still want to hear who it is. What is it?

Yeah. If you google Leviathan Aquarium kickstarter, you'll find it. The actual URL is Kickstarter. Comprojectsdriverliviathan, which I don't expect anyone to type out or spell correctly. We'll have in the show notes or just googling biath and aquarium automation that'll get it. There's a whole bunch of stories on places like Reef Builders or hackster IO about it, and it'll also take you directly to the Kickstarter page.

So I just want to make people know that you don't have to be tech savvy to be interested in this. The reason why this is so important is right now, you can go to the Kickstarter campaign, and there's different pledges that you can do and you can spend just for instance, I'm a freshwater guy. He has got different packages available that you can purchase right now for the next seven days, which means that this fine gentleman Brandon will build you the entire Leviathan kit and essentially send you a finished product that you would hook up and get running right away.

Did you know that, Brandon?

I am now told.

There you go.

Get busy.

Well, that's what it says on your website, correct?

Someone else must have made that. No? Yeah, I'm definitely doing those.

So say goodbye to your wife and get in the shop. And start working.

Yeah, I actually limited those to 100 because I didn't expect this to grow as quickly as it did or way surpass my goal. And the boards themselves are pretty easy and not time intensive for me to create. But the packages, they're not hard to build. It's just a lot of wiring and a lot of time. Printing the pieces, putting them all together, that sort of thing. Someone doing it on their own, they can do it in a couple of weekends. But me building 50 of them, 100 of them, it definitely adds up.

So why this is so important for the community to watch and follow along with is not just because you can do a do it yourself project to make yourself a very advanced controller. More advanced than you can purchase. But because this is the bleeding edge of where the new aquarium tech is coming out of it's trying to make it so that beginners don't necessarily have to be mad chemists that have learned the wrong way for so. Many years in the aquarium hobby that they can have a simple system they plug into their aquarium setup to tell them exactly what they need or at least for the best of their ability to attempt to help. Make this easier for a lot of keepers, especially for reefs.

Yeah, absolutely. The board itself makes reef pie very easy to get into, lowers a lot of the barriers of entry. There the time it took to design all of it, the cost for all the pieces. It's cheaper to just get this than buying all the pieces yourself and the technical knowledge needed. One of the things that will come for everyone that backs the campaign is access to a Google Drive folder, which will have super detailed instructions for setting up from the $14 board all the way to entire set up. Like you were saying, building it from the ground up. Or just the people that buy one of the prewired packages has instructions on how to use it. And it will also have a file they can download so they don't have to go in, learn linux commands, terminal, figure out how to set all that up. They just download it to their sd card, pop it in, and they're good to go.

So certainly check it out. We'll have it in the show notes. Maybe we can convince you in the future that after, once this is all set up and done, that you can build a completely in a box product and sell it to bosch, have them make that the best controller yet. Beating Apex.

Yeah. I don't know if they're in the aquarium business yet, but you'll get them there massive. I'm sure they're somewhere in there.

Well, I appreciate it, Brandon. So the next topic we wanted to go into, with time being a concern, we don't want to talk your ears off all day, but is 3d printing. We get a lot of requests on do it yourself articles. The most famous fish tuber out there, joey the King of DIY. He's shown how to make tanks and just has a library of sump information. And it's a wonderful wealth of information, but things that really don't get covered is 3d printing. So for those that have never heard of 3d printing, number one, Jimmy, you live in a hole and shut up. You know, I will explain it to you.

Jim.

This is, this is the part of.

The podcast right now I'm going to punch in the throat, right?

Jimmy's like please explain it to me like I'm five. So for those that are listening, I've never heard of 3d printing. You have a normal printer at your work or your home. You simply click print and you have a piece of paper that's pulled up and ink is pushed onto a piece of paper. That's the simple way of printing. So printing an object is really foreign to people. When you print an object, your printer simply takes a metal needle and extrudes plastics through it, printing layer after layer, making you an actual tangible object. It's incredible to watch. It's one of the funnest hobbies you can have. And it used to be this DIY project, much like the Reef Pie Leviathan, there's a plenty of other projects out there that you can see in adafruit, but now it's commercial. You can just go to a store, they have them at Best Buy, and you can buy yourself a printer ready to go and plug into your computer and use right from the get go. So some of the recommendations that are out there, if you're looking to get in and try 3d printing for the first time, if you're text heavy, there's the ender. Three. Three. It's really cheap printers. $200. These things used to be ten grand.

I was going to say they're really come down in price. We've talked about this before.

It's like the microwave from your generation juice.

That's right.

The size of a under three. Despite the price, they're actually pretty nice printers and they have a few friends with some and they're a lot better than you expect for 200, for sure.

The difference is from like under 300 and another printer is you just have to do some set up. They have some of the same feature sets. They're a great printer. But if you don't want any hassle and you're not tech savvy at all and you still want a 3d print, you can go to a website, robo three D, and they have fantastic printers for around that $500 price range up to $1,000. And they're literally at the roll of plastic. It looks like the plastic you put in your weed whip.

Like a weed whacker whip, right?

Yeah, it's the same type of plastic. So you just simply load in your favorite color, go to your computer and you can go to a website called thingaverse. I'm just making sure I get this correct thingaververse.com. That's Thingigerse.com. thingiverse. Right. And it's a library of all of these different 3d designs, of everything you can think of that you can print. You can print out tele action figures. You can print out a cup holder for your lawnmower there Jimmy.

There you go. So you're talking $200 for a printer. Kind of an entry level, probably, I'm saying.

And we'll say five for one that you don't have to mess with.

But anyway, rob's this weekend made some nice strainers for his bulkhead. And to buy them was how much, Rob? Like 910 bucks.

910 bucks.

And we needed to print about ten or so. And so that's about $100. And you probably printed them all for what, a buck 50, you thought?

Probably less than a quarter.

Right. So anyway, here's somebody that just printed all these, and they're beautiful. I'm holding one right now.

And just to let you know, it does look like the design I made looks like a butt plug.

I'm going to put it down now. That's disgusting.

I'll have pictures. It's on the discord. Certainly go to our discord. It's aquariumgeistpodcast.com bought on the website. It's a chat to use. We'll have pictures on there. I actually already posted them.

Anyway, what's so cool about these is you would have spent about $100 on them. You printed these off basically overnight, and you basically spent $100, which you just put towards your printer. You do this a few times and your printers paid for when's the last time your printer ever paid for itself? Never.

I've used these for a lot of random objects in the house. Now, some things are definitely cheaper than 3d printing. If you want to do, like, small little plastic objects. Sometimes you go to the dollar store and you'll find a pack of those plastic of items that are a lot easier than just printing. But for these custom items or replacement parts or whatever you can think of, it's a big value. And frankly, you can customize it really easy. They have free customized software where you just simply make it bigger so you can do the correct size you're looking for. Like those bulkheads. They were quite small when I originally tried to manipulate them. And I made them bigger for my one inch bulkhead.

Right. And then you also made some nice little bile balls for your tank. I was surprised how much media area there is on that thing.

So the entire idea with biomedia or bile balls is you want the most surface area possible to be able to collect as much beneficial bacteria growing on those objects. And the stuff that you get purchased, they're decently, expensive. You have to pay $30 for a decent bag of it. And it's not going to be cheaper doing it with 3d printing because each ball is going to take you about 20 minutes to a half an hour. To print for each individual ball. And these are about, what, a half inch?

Yeah. About the size of a Super Bowl.

Right. Or rubber or bouncy ball.

Yeah, that's a Super Bowl. That's back in the day, it's what.

We called rob didn't have coin machines. He was that generation where they ran out of quarters.

That's right, because they're all spending money on freaking poised to men.

Well, you suggest jimmy, he was telling me about how all these times of a jacks at the son of fountain what? Yeah. Throwing jacks at the A. You're going to punch me in the throat?

I'm not punching the throat. And I'm going to shove you in a foam booth and I'm going to throw you off a cruise ship. That's what I do to you.

Everything in time. But there's a lot of different objects you can print with 3d printing. And if you want to get into it again, that's the price points for the printer. Very easy to use plug and play to your computer. And there's different types of plastics to use. And it's gotten more and more diverse as 3d printing has been going over through the years. But the most common is a type of plastics like ABS, PLA, nylon. There's a lot of different materials to print from, and I just want to give you guys a quick guide. If you want to print either aquarium decor, accessories, anything you're looking for, we'll give you some ideas of what to print as possibilities, but it's literally endless. But as far as the materials that you can use, it's $20 for, I believe it's a cubic yard of this weed whacking material, the plastic itself, and it lasts forever. So $20 for each color, and you just put the roller in your printer. And I really recommend using PLA. PLA is number one of the cheapest. You can get food safe, and by default, it's food safe. So if you want to print yourself a fork or a plate, you can. Most of them are dishwasher safe. Read the label. Either that or ABS is another one. But I want to warn you that if you're going to be using this grade called ABS in a saltwater aquarium like brandon's, don't do it, because the saltwater will eventually erode. It's not like fresh. It will erode chemicals out of the plastic.

Can I try in on a couple of the PLA things?

Yes, sir.

Two things on there. One. The PLA is very ubiquitous and really good for a lot of projects, but I actually wouldn't recommend using it in an aquarium, typically because it's cornstarch based and I haven't seen it personally. But I've heard a lot of people that have had PLA prints in an aquarium that will degrade over the span of about six months to a year.

So the difference between the PLA that he's experiencing and the PLA that I use is having that food safe label. They're all essentially made with a bit of cornstarch in them, but having the food safe grade is how they evaporate and dissolve in the tank. I've had PLA prints that you have the food safe label in my tank for four years without an issue where I have heard the non food safe in there. So if you're looking for it and you're really concerned, have that food safe label on yourself, and then the food safe will cost you probably another six, $7 on the roll.

So for food safe PLA, how does it get around the gaps in there, the surface area, for something like you're mentioning dishes or utensils or something?

I don't think it does. It still probably has that same surface area. But the idea that you can I don't recommend making yourself a plate. So when you print that little nozzle.

They'Re a nickel at Walmart.

They're a nickel at Walmart.

Lazy Air.

The little nozzle that you have on the 3d printer prints at generally, depending on the dimension of your printer, a 10th of a millimeter. That's how much the string prints out of the head. So a tiny little string of print. So when you print these out, you'll feel that it's a rough surface. It feels like it has an edge and a texture. That's what we're talking about is having that texture to it. So here's a story. I don't know. Safety warning, right? For those kids listening in, turn this off. Now. I started getting 3d prints, and people wanted custom. Can you make a figurine? Can you 3d scan my face and print it? Hey, can you make me this for my shoe? And of course, one of the naughty ear people said, can you make me a personal toy, if you're getting my drift? And I'm like, well, how could you do that? It has a rough edge. If you're going to use that for a personal item, it will abras your skin and rub your raw. Right?

So way too much information.

Oh, this is important for aquariums, though. So if you're doing a 3d print and it's something's going to rub and you need a smooth surface, you can use two different types of material. One, there is silicone spray. You can get this on Amazon. It's just silicone coating. That's a clear coat. It's an aerosol can. Essentially, you get three coats, and it makes it baby, but smooth. Full touch.

Also, like, if you're making a toothbrush.

Sure, don't make a toothbrush. Perfect.

If you're making a toothbrush, it'd be nice and smooth in your mouth. Okay, I enjoyed that, right?

So I made these personal toys for adults, for these people to grade it, and it apparently was a success. I have to choose my vocabulary very careful here. So if you're wanting to use something like this that you need something smooth in the tank, like, you need a fitting onto a filter, and you want to make it smooth. Certainly look at the silicone. Otherwise, if you're really concerned about toxins, you can use food safe epoxy as well. And that will make a smooth surface fitting into these tiny, tiny groups in any 3d print. Okay, so the ones that you really have to worry about, again, I mentioned ABS, you already talked about some of the PLA that isn't food safe, that can bleach in the water. But nylon, nylon has a lot more flexibility and they use it for a lot of different materials that are going to get hit or moved a lot. Like something that's going to get rubbed in some sort of toolset or something. And don't use this for your aquarium. Nylon absorbs and will swell in the water. It's not necessarily that it's a toxin issue. It's that whatever you print, it's just going to blow up a little bit and ruin.

So don't use it for your personal toys.

Don't use it for your personal toys.

All right.

I like where you got where that one?

No, I'm just saying don't use it for your toothbrush.

Don't use toothbrush, man.

It'll be cool. Charter is going to be down here again and we're going to have a stick. We're going to have another meeting and I'm going to have to pretend like I care.

Don't make us watch those videos again.

Not again. Lord help me.

So some of the things that you can print with the 3d printer that I recommend, I have in thingaverse. You can actually save your prints. Kind of like pinterest it's quite nice. So I have in here frag plugs. There's these little essentially pedestals. You put little frags on those, you get in bags. They're coral frags.

You're talking about coral frags, correct?

Yeah. I mean, I don't know what other frags there are.

You said plugs and it just threw me off. And from the previous conversation, I just wanted to clear that up.

Why are you holding the butt plug again?

HR. I'm just going to call myself.

So some of the other things that you can have is hose adapters. The most common things that I print is when you're in a pinch and you need a hose adapter. For airlines, you can make, you know yourself a Y adapter, a X adapter, whatever you're looking for. You can make hinges for aquariums, bulkhead adapters, filter covers. You can make yourself brine shrimp hatcheries.

No way.

Absolutely.

Thanks for making me one tomorrow.

See as I do this, jimmy's. Like I want that. Can you print it for me? We'll just have to get him a 3d printer for Christmas next year. No, everything in time. You can make the filter media, which I already told you about. Another one is people get these rimless aquarium tops and they're like, how am I supposed to put a top on it? Well, you can actually get the corner pieces. So you can put a glass piece for a top. You can print out the corner cover holders is what they're called support covers. Those are nice heater covers. You can actually print sponge filters off of this. We're going to probably do that next time we try to make your square ones.

I've got that rimless aquarium over at my house with the discus, sand and stuff, and that would be wonderful for you to make me some of those, too. Put that on your list of things to do tomorrow.

All right, we'll get on that. Just a couple more to go off the top. I think the most common is materials like grates to put plants on. We already talked about how you can use frag plugs, but just putting plants on. So these are essentially flat shelves. You can put suction cups on in your aquarium, and they're just mesh grates where you can feed either plants roots through or start a plant off of it. They're really handy for, like, shrimp beds. There's a lot of cool things you can do. Check it out on thingaverse.com. It's fantastic. Just type in aquarium and start scrolling for days.

Yeah, there's tons of options. One thing before we leave the topic, I also want to throw in for the filaments, have you ever used or heard of Pet or pet g?

I have. I haven't used a lot of it personally, but there are so many different types. And some of the things that they're doing now, they're even doing wood filament. So you can print wood objects. Now Jimmy is losing his mind right here. How can you print wood objects? So it's not 100% wood, it's about 50% wood. And the rest, it's mixed with plastic, but when you print it, it's a sandable stainable material. I've never used it for aquariums, but I'm assuming you could. They do have a pla food safe version of this wood filament, but I would recommend definitely seal coating that or epoxying that to make sure that the wood isn't rotten. Your aquarium.

Yeah, it just sounds like a terrible idea. Is great, though.

I have to agree with you. I think Rob is a little bit off base there.

I'm actually on a website here that actually shows that people do use it. But, yeah, I'm on your guys'page. That sounds crazy.

What else you got?

Anything that you printed, Brandon?

Well, all of the pieces that go into leviathan the enclosures, the temperature brackets, the float brackets, all of those things I've designed and 3d printed. Anything that's outside of the tank, like the enclosure itself, I print and PLA. And then anything that goes inside of the tank, I use pet g. Basically the same material they use for water bottles, so it's pretty safe. One of the things I've really liked that I've discovered I can do is embedding little neodymium magnets into the prints so you can make brackets or coral frag holders. And instead of having to use suction cups, which end up getting brittle, and terrible after a year or two, like they always do. You just have these magnets embedded into your prints so you can have a piece on the outside with magnets that just clips it on, like power heads, basically.

That's incredible.

Yeah.

That is a great idea. I like that.

So if there's anything you can come up with certainly thingaverse.com, check it out. And if you need help, go to our discord. I'd be happy, personally to help you. I know there's a couple of other people in our discord that's certainly 3d print for their aquariums. I've made a lot of different objects, clips, broken pieces for filters. It saved me a lot of money. And I think this bulkhead project really proves it. $9 for these little bullhead filters. And for those like, what's a bulkhead filter or a bulkhead, I should say it's a hole that you would put in your aquarium or some other vessel with water intentionally. You want to put a drain in. So it's just a plastic cover that allows you to have a drain in your aquarium.

So, yeah, to really simplify it, it's kind of like your bathroom sink. When your bathroom sink gets full to the point because you have the stopper pulled. And once your sink is full and it drains out the back to the little slots in your sink, it's basically the same thing as what we're talking about. And so the bulkhead fittings, if you were to buy the strainer and the bulkhead fittings, you're talking $15 to $20 per tank. rob's doing 910 tanks down here. He was able to buy the bulkheads, but he wanted to save a little bit of money, which I don't blame him make his own filters. And he received himself $100. And they were done overnight.

Each one of those bulkheads and they're what are you looking at them what? Two and a half inches apiece?

What's that?

The bulkhead covers that I just sit next to.

Oh, gosh, yes.

Yeah, that took about 2 hours and 20 minutes apiece.

And the thing is, you can set it up to print overnight. You go to bed at 10:00 at night and get up at 07:00 in the morning, and they're all done. They're all sitting there ready for you to go.

It beats Amazon Shipping. You go on there, you have to wait two days. Now I just have to wait 2 hours.

Screw Amazon. They're we go. Let's make them mad, too.

Oh, boy.

So before we leave, another potential sponsor.

Yeah, there's that's okay. We don't need any stinking sponsors.

Except for Joe Shrimp.

Joe shrimp shack.

Use promo code aquarium guys to check out.

Yeah, I guess we'll be editing that.

Out before I leave, you guys. If there's anybody that's missing a finger this sounds weird. If anybody's missing a finger or has a chronovis I have 3d print models to have a finger replacement, like a prosthetic. And I've been trying to find someone to test this with my 3d printing modeling skills. So if you are missing a finger, contact us at our website, aquariumgrasspodcast.com. I would love to print and send you a finger.

I just want to say I just read an article about a company that stood up and did the right thing. There was somebody that could not afford an artificial leg, and because my mom had some health problems, she ended up losing both her legs. She had artificial legs? They're about $10,000 a piece, and they don't fit well. And anyway, long story short, these people had set up their 3d printer, and they printed off these legs for this little girl, and it made national news, and it was enough to make you cry. And this little girl came in into their shop, and they did some measuring with different things, and she came back, like, three days later and had these legs done for her on three D, and they looked almost real, and they worked fantastic. And I think they said the whole cost was, like, $37.50, if I remember right.

That's a while.

And they're also doing 3d. There's some companies now that are setting up for third world countries. They're setting up these huge 3d printers, and they're printing small homes.

So if anybody thinks concrete printers, right? If anybody thinks that Jimmy isn't in touch with some technology, you have another thing coming.

Oh, yeah, I follow. I read. I can read articles nonstop. You look at me like I can't read, you dumb dumb.

Well, Brandon, you got anything else for us, buddy?

I think that's it. Yeah, this has been great.

This has been an experience.

That was the big question mark at the end, wasn't it?

Yeah, try that again. That's been fantastic.

How about you, Adam? Got anything for Brandon Adams?

Always got questions.

Well, okay, so here's one of my questions. The food grade and the food safe plastics that you guys use in your aquariums, how does that go for the lights? Because I know that if you have regular lighting on plastic or the uv lighting, especially for reptile tanks, it really ruins the plastic fast. Does this plastic that you put in the aquarium get damaged by the lights?

As far as I know, PLA is pretty sensitive to uv exposure and is prone to being brittle after that.

That is correct.

I don't think Pet G has that problem. I don't know for sure about ABS, because I've never personally printed with it.

PLA is definitely vulnerable to it. I've had, again, like I said, those pieces in my aquarium for three or four years, and over a light, they get brittle. They don't have the flexibility they had, but they still maintain. If I've had it in there for four years, it literally acts as though it's any other type of plastic, and it's the same issue. But, yeah, the Pet G does not have that issue. Although I've had issues where they have some pet g that leaks over into the water.

It leaches in.

Make sure whatever filament you're buying that you're making sure it's food safe.

Oh, yeah, that's definitely a number one.

It just acts like any other plastic in the tank, so absolutely affected by uv.

So I got a quick question. Is there anything that's based on these type of things for your 3d printer? Is there anything that's, like, silicone based at all? Is that something that I know? My silicone airline tubing lasts a heck of a lot longer than my regular airline tubing, and that's what I've switched to over in my home. I just like the silicone a lot better because it's still soft after two, three years or anything like that.

I think the closest thing I've seen to silicone for a 3d printer is a material called tpu. I know a brand I've used that I really like is called ninja flex, where it's not quite as bendable and flexible as silicone.

You beat me with a punch.

It's very squishy.

I like squishy.

To give you an example, you remember back in the day, they had what's called those iphone jelly condoms? It was basically like those little rubbery floppy cell phone covers.

Why are you looking at me like I know what I'm you remember all.

Those kids had those, like, rubbery covers they put on their iphones?

Okay.

It's that same soft jelly before they had otter. Right? Before they had otter boxes.

Incredible. You guys are a wealth of information.

Absolutely. We're here for you, Jimmy.

Thank you.

He'll read about us in the paper someday.

Yeah, the wanted section, I'll just say.

Exactly.

Well, he's Brandon. I mean, he works for bosch.

Yeah, up until they hear this podcast, the Law catches up with you. We'll talk about that off air.

Oh, that was before air, wasn't it?

Thanks for bringing it up, though.

Anything else from me, Adam?

Any chance you can add is there any safe plastics that you could add to your uv printer that you could print off glow in the dark stuff for your glow in the dark betas?

Yes, and that's exactly printed for my bulkheads because I had some extra glow in the dark that was food safe. Most glow in the dark can be not food safe, but the glow chemical is supposed to be nontoxic. Just make sure it's food safe. But mine works. I've used glow in the dark stuff all the time, actually on purpose, so I can get algae to grow, ironically.

Okay, so I know what your question is next, Adam, is, like, when Rob is making these personal things for people, did they use glow in the dark? Yes, so you don't lose your toothbrush.

And they generally engrave names into it, which is even creepier.

Yeah, because in case you leave it.

On their own, if you leave it.

In the bus stop or whatever, you just want to make sure you get your toothbrush back.

Mine says Jim colby.

Great. Please put my phone number and address on it, you dick.

While it's like a dog name tag, in case you lose it, they'll call you back. Hey, I found your personal toy.

All right, we'll see you at the HR meeting tomorrow morning.

All right, guys. Well, thanks for the podcast. Thank you, Brandon. And again, you got feedback, email us, call us aquariumguyspodcast.com. Thanks again for your support, and share this with a friend. darn it. Podcast out.

Bye.

Thanks, guys, for listening to this podcast. Please visit us at aquarium guidespodcast.com and listen to us on spotify, iheartradio, itunes, and anywhere you can listen to podcasts.

We're practically everywhere. We're on Google. I mean, just go to your favorite place, Pocket casts. Subscribe to make sure it gets push notifications directly to your phone. Otherwise, Jim will be crying into sleep.

Can I listen to it in my tree house?

In your tree house, in your fish room, even alone at work.

What about my man cave?

Especially your man cave. Yeah, only if Adam is there.

Yeah. No.

With feeder guppy. No, no.

They're endless.

You imagine loving, flag sucking mother flag.

Well, I guess we'll see you next time. Later.