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Saturday, June 17th, 10:30PM
I actually didn’t make it to Sea Life park today. I slept in to 9:30 and arrived at the lab for around 11:00. John Potter (the sound researcher guy from Singapore) had been there for a while already, and had received a response from his lab in Singapore about a second data-acquisition box. Yesterday, John had accidentally hooked the unlabled battery leads up backwards to the data aquisition box (at least, that was the current theory) and it no longer seemed to power up. He arranged yesterday to get his group back in Singapore to send him a replacement. They had already sent the unit FedEX express, but according to FedEX, the package would not arrive to us any earlier than Tuesday afternoon. That would likely not be enough time to do any serious trials before John would have to leave (his plane was for 7:15 PM or so TUESDAY).
First of all though, I decided to have a look at John’s laptop to be sure the small splash of water that hit it yesterday wasn’t getting inside. Yesterday, Elele apparently did a rather large leap in front of Dr. Potter's equipment setup, and some water got on the laptop. Sure enough, there was salt water sitting on top of the PCMCIA slots and the keyboard. Good thing I checked it! I cleaned that off, and focussed on the blown acquisition module. John had already taken a look for some kind of fuse or something without any luck. We attempted to trace the circuit first, but that wasn’t any real help. Anyway, the long and short of it is I managed to spot a little tiny resistor sized fuse that was in a removable slot on the motherboard. We had missed it until now because it looked more like a green resistor than a fuse, but it turned out to be a blown fuse after all. We didn’t have another fuse to replace it with, so we had to improvise with a paper clip and some solder as per my suggestion. We took two short pieces of paper clip, put them in the fuse socket, bent them so they ALMOST touched each other, and bridged a small amount of solder across them. This way, if the unit shorts out again, the solder will heat up and fall off. Not porfect, but a good temporary fix. Once we finished, everything seemed to work perfectly. I was so happy to be part of the whole process. I actually made a difference! I’m really tired so I think I’ll cut the log short tonight. My eyes are constantly closing while I’m typing. Man, this dolphin research is really tiring! I’m going in tomorrow morning to help with tank cleaning and hopefully to also have a chance to feed the dolphins afterwards. I’ll probably go to Sea Life park as well in the afternoon. |
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