What I did on my first day of quarantine.

 Before I write about my exciting first day, I need to show you the instructions for the toilet control panel.

Jen asked me what the difference between "Spray" and "Bidet" is.  As near as I can tell, it's the aiming angle.  I didn't know that when she asked, though.  All it needs to do is talk and I'd feel like Mater in Cars 2.  Enough of that, though.

I didn't realize I would be expected to take and report my temperature every day.  I should have, I guess.  It makes sense.  However, I didn't bring a thermometer.  Every day at 11 am I will get an email from the Ministry of Labor, Health, and Welfare asking me to fill out a questionnaire by 2:00.  If I don't, I'll get in trouble of some sort.  This problem needed solving, so I channeled my inner MacGyver and got to work.

What I did bring was a data acquisition card, wire, and a 10 kilo-ohm thermistor.  (I am planning to do some preliminary research work for my sabbatical in the Fall.  It's not like I travel everywhere with these things.  Although, given what I needed to do, I might start to.)  The thermistor is an electrical component designed to have a resistance that varies with temperature in a highly predictable and easily modeled way.  If you have a digital, under tongue thermometer at home, it has a thermistor in it.  Likewise for an electrical/smart thermostat.  The result is I have what I'd wager to be the most expensive thermometer being used in the building.

I don't have wire cutters (I'm planning to buy a pair when I get to Tokushima), so I "stress fatigued" the wire to get usable lengths.  That means I twisted the wire around and around and around, then back the other way until it broke.  I used the edge of a door hinge to help me strip the insulation, connected the wires to the proper terminals on the red thing (LabJack U6-Pro), then twisted the thermistor's leads around the other ends of the wires.  I was reluctant to stick the thermistor directly in my mouth.  Partly because I don't want that in my mouth, but mostly because saliva conducts electricity and it would mess with the reading.  Fortunately I have the plastic wrap that was used to cover my breakfast.  I tore a piece of that and wrapped the sensor, insulating the leads from one another, then into the abomination you see above.

The data acquisition card (DAQ) plugs into the computer.  Provided you have the program to talk to it, you can read the information from it.  I had to download the datasheet for the termistor to know the constants for converting from resistance to temperature.  I was lucky because I brought the thing in its correct packaging which meant I had the manufacturer's serial number.  Otherwise it would have been who knows how long on Digikey's website trying to find the right one.  Once I had that, though, 15 minutes of Python coding and debugging, and ta daa!

 

 

Not only will this read the voltage (which is all any DAQ card really does), but it converts that reading to temperature in Celsius and writes the output to a file.  $450 for the DAQ, $600 for the computer, $0.10 for the thermistor, wire, and plastic wrap.  When it worked, I sang "Problem Solved" from Peg+Cat.

This is what happens when I need things to do.