Animal Thermometer Setup
Fusion can work with any type of temperature probe as long as it presents itself as a serial device. If your computer doesn’t have a serial port, it is possible to find serial to USB converters and serial to Bluetooth converters.
If you use such a converter, there will be some software or drivers that need to be installed and configured so that the temperature probe ends up looking like a serial device. Please note that every temperature probe and every converter work differently and we are not able to help with the configuration of this equipment. If you are having trouble with this aspect, please refer the documentation that came with the temperature probe and/or the converter or call the manufacturer for additional help.
However, once the device is properly installed and configured as a serial port, getting Fusion to work with it should be fairly easy.
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Please consult the Resource Guide for more information on temperature probes. |
Setup Fields
- Port. Choose the port the temperature probe is connected to. If you make changes to ports in the operating system while this window is open, click the Refresh Port List button. Fusion will ask the operating system for available ports and any new ones can be chosen from the list.
- Baud Rate - Encoding. All of these settings need to match what the temperature probe is expecting. You will need to see the probe manual or contact the manufacturer if you are not sure what these settings should be. If you and the manufacturer are unsure what the Encoding field should be, leave it set to ISO-8859-1.
- Termination String. The temperature probe will send a special sequence of characters after each temperature reading so Fusion knows when the last digit of the value has been sent. This sequence needs to be entered here.
- ASCII. If the termination string characters can be entered directly, you can turn the ASCII checkbox off. However, usually these strings include characters that cannot be entered directly. In that case leave this option on and enter the ASCII equivalent for each character. If there is more than one character, separate each character by a comma (ex. 13,10).
- Probe Output Units. You need to let Fusion know what units the probe is sending temperatures in. It doesn’t matter which one is used because Fusion will convert is as necessary.
- Threshold Value. The device should be configured to constantly be sending temperature readings to Fusion. The threshold value is the temperature at which Fusion switches modes. When it is above this threshold Fusion will assume the probe is in the animal and it will begin figuring out the high temperature. When it is below this threshold, Fusion assumes the probe is not in the animal. 80 ̊F seems to work well in most cases.
- Delay Before Catch Value. Fusion will automatically detect the high point when the probe is in an animal, partially by seeing if the high temperature can be maintained for this long. Two seconds is normally a good setting.
If you are having trouble figuring out what the Termination String field should be we refer you to the Resource Guide which goes into more depth.
Getting Here
You can open this window by clicking the appropriate Setup… button in the Physical Computer Management window.
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