Design Issues

If you have been reading my blog a while you will remember that I was planning to select a portable DVD player as my 5 year service award here at work. As it turns out, the lady that told me that that was an option was wrong. Apparently it was a 15 year service award gift, so I had to select something else. I ended up going with a digital thermometer that has a remote sensor so that you can know the outside as well as the inside temperature. I have seen these before and thought that they were pretty cool, so I ordered it.

It arrived last night, so I went about setting it up. In typical guy fashion I started putting it together and didn't bother reading the instructions until after the fact. Turns out you have to do things in a very specific order for the reciever and transmitter to calibrate correctly and by pure chance I managed to do it more or less right. That is to say, I didn't mess it up badly enought that I had to start over.

Now for the fun part. I had to find a place to mount the outside reciever. The first problem was that I wanted to put it on our bedroom but the transmitter had to be less that 80 feet away and any walls that it had to pass through would decrease that distance. The other and more difficult problem was that the outside transmitter, could not in any circumstance, get wet. I'm no genius or anything but how do you design an OUTDOOR transmitter in such a way that it will not work if it gets wet? Seems like that should have been on the top of the design requirements list to me, but what do I know?

I finally decided on a spot above the basement window that was about 4 feet off the ground and under a 3 foot overhang and set about installing it. I realized rather quickly that I was going to need a flashlight to do this since it gets dark at 5:30 these days. Of course I couldn't find one so I did what any Dad would do in my shoes. I found the nearest toy that emitted light of any kind. It was a flashlight shaped like a cow that moo's everytime you turn it on. I can only imagine what the neighbors must have thought if they had happened to be outside.

In the end I got it set up and working, and I know that without a doubt that the outside of our basement window was 16.9 degreees this morning.