I built SmartSurf first: a waterproof GPS tracker to protect riders and recover lost boards. Then I built Senlay — the context layer SmartSurf uses to understand the real conditions around the rider.
20 years teaching on the water — boards drift, riders disappear, schools search by eyesight and luck.
Built the waterproof tracker first: solar-powered, epoxy-sealed GPS for the rider and the board.
GPS alone wasn't enough. Built Senlay as the context layer — wind, current, waves, terrain — so SmartSurf can reason about why the rider stopped, not just where.
4 hardware generations, working Senlay API, school workflow, and a live demo at senlay.world.
I spent years teaching people to move safely in wind, waves, and changing weather. That work trains a different instinct: you learn to read the water before it explains itself, to notice the gust before a student feels it, and to treat physics as something with consequences.
I also kept building. Rope-access work taught respect for margins. Kitesurfing taught wind systems. Paragliding taught calm decision-making. Every discipline punishes shallow answers — and they all fed into the first SmartSurf prototype.
SmartSurf grew from that same habit: notice what is really happening, trust real measurements, help people make better decisions. When GPS alone wasn't enough to understand why a rider stopped, I built Senlay as the physical-world context layer that SmartSurf needed.
"For most of my life I had the ideas. AI tools finally gave me the hands to build them."
Weather apps show numbers. On the beach, those numbers have to become decisions. I learned the problem through repetition: students arriving overpowered, boards drifting away, gusts turning a good session into a rescue, and forecasts missing the local effect that everyone on the beach could feel.
Kitesurfing, surfing, hydrofoil, and paragliding all punish shallow answers. The useful question is never only "what is the wind?" It is: where is it coming from, what shaped it, what is changing, and what should a human do now?
I saw it again and again as an instructor. Boards drift away. Riders lose their boards. The wind drops far from shore. A windsurfer snaps a mast. A wingfoiler loses the wing. A foil hits something underwater. Sometimes you can still see a rider — a small dot far out, drifting — and the sun is going down.
Schools deal with this the only way they can: eyesight, radios, instinct, and luck. I wanted something better than luck.
During the COVID lockdowns I built the first prototype: a solar-powered, epoxy-sealed GPS tracker for the rider and the board. No buttons, no charging port, no path for water to get in — just a magnetic switch. I potted it, mounted it, and tested it in the same waters I taught in.
It answered one question well: where is the board? That solved lost gear. But a stopped dot on a map still doesn't tell you whether a person is in trouble.
I wanted the system to reason about the situation, not just the location. When I connected a model to the live data, it could check track history, drift speed, distance from shore. Useful — but still not enough to answer why.
The model had no idea about the wind, the current, the waves, the tide, or what the bottom looked like under that rider. Without that context, it started guessing. And a guess is not safety.
That gap is the reason I built Senlay — a verification engine that lets the system compare live sensors, forecast models, marine data, GPS movement, and local spot logic before the AI makes a safety recommendation. Now it doesn't just track a point. It calculates the whole situation: the rider, the board, the weather, the water, the coastline, the drift direction, and how those things interact in real time.
"GPS tells us where the rider is. Senlay's verification layer helps AI understand what is actually happening around them."
Before Senlay, the answer was hardware that had to survive the ocean. Every generation made the idea sharper.
Epoxy-sealed tracker with external solar support and board placement tests. The first answer to the lost-board problem.
Larger panel, board-top integration, real beach and water exposure. Tested in Hoi An's real conditions.
SOS, wireless charging tests, board mounts, paired rider-board communication hardware. 1NCE cellular IoT integration.
A small room where boards, batteries, tools, and ideas turn into working things.
The trackers were mounted on real boards, near real water, with sand, heat, and impact waiting.
Paragliding teaches the same lesson in another language: wind, timing, and margins matter. Two disciplines that make risk visible — launch margins, vertical exposure, weather shifts, and consequence-aware decisions.
This is not abstract. My family lives near the sea. The sea deserves respect — and so do the people who go out on it.
Years of direct teaching in real wind and wave conditions, where safety depends on reading subtle changes fast.
Solar trackers, board mounts, charging experiments, 3D-printed cases, epoxy sealing, and live ocean testing across 4 hardware generations.
Two disciplines that make risk visible: launch margins, vertical exposure, weather shifts, and consequence-aware decisions.
Flat lifetime cellular connectivity for IoT devices. What makes SmartSurf's unit economics viable at $299.
I use AI tools to build faster. The direction comes from years outside with real equipment and real weather. For most of my life I had the ideas. AI tools gave me the hands.
A live product: working demo at senlay.world, docs, API key flow, SmartSurf app. Not a pitch deck. A live platform.
Whether you run a school, ride seriously, build AI agents, or invest in physical-world infrastructure — I'd like to talk.