Inserting results from external measurement devices into the CumulusMX output files

[willyweather]

Hi there,

I have extra HW now (Homematic), which provides a solar radiation measurement result every 3 minutes (in "Flux").

Now I would like to feed this external measurement results somehow into the result files of CumulusMX so that these will be shown in my website
as if my weather station would provide this (which the WH1080 doesn't at all).

There are certainly more than one possibilities to get that. Maybe someone knows, which one would be best ?

Thanks for any hint.

best regards,

Wilfried

[willyweather]

OK, maybe I have been to vague. Here are some specific infos to the problem I'm trying to resolve:

One possibility would be to write an independent Linux script (bash?) which should run every 15 min.

The only task of this script would be to search for the current log file in use by CumulusMX, search for the last entry of CumuluMX and overwrite some values in this line (the solar values, which are 0 by default in my case).

The question is:
Will CumulusMX take control over this log file only for the short moment, when it writes to it and will CumulusMX close the access to this file whenever it doesn't need to write to it ?

If yes, the next questions come to my mind:
What happens in the case of a conflict, i.e. if both programs try to get hold of the log file, will they queue or will one of the two loose ?
How about the risk of messing up the whole Linux file system by doing such things?

Any comments to that approach ?

thanks a lot.

regards,

Wilfried

[ConligWX]

why does it have to be imported into cumulusmx data file?

if this vaule is written to any file surely you can somehow import that into a webpage via some html/php code? just ftp the file to the webserver if it is created on the cumulus server. have the web page then read that value.

[willyweather]

High Toxic17,
thanks for the comment - I thought about that already, too.

The real reason for not doing it this way is: I don't have a clue about HTML / website programming.
That's the reason, why I'm using Steve's original web-Pages with only minor modifications (which have been hard enough for me either).

I think, the values of the CumulusMX log file are used in several web-pages in several different views (now, today, trends etc...) which all would have to be modified properly. This is - at the moment - far beyond my knowledge.

My thoughts in detail:
What I understood so far (from the Wiki etc.) is, that the template files are taken every x Minutes by CumulusMX directly on my Raspberry, filled up with the values coming from the log files. By this, the final web files are created which will then be uploaded to my website (also by CumulusMX). Right?
Since I don't have a php capable website no further processing can be done there. Right?
So I don't see a possibility to insert my own values in the final web files on the web server. ?!?

But as I said, I only know very little about these things and might be wrong.

regards,

Wilfried

[PaulMy]

Can you import your extra data into another template file, using one of the xxxT.htm and modify it to suit if you have difficulty to begin from scratch, then have Cumulus update that file through the extra files setting and only FTP, not process the file.
like http://www.komokaweather.com/weather/now_komoka.htm

Paul

[ConligWX]

Wilfried

The default template files are html files with "webtags" in them. CumulusMX "Processes" these if require and creates a new htm file and replaces the webtag with the value and then moved the html files to the webserver.

you should be able to add some code into the template file you need this value to appear in. the code would read a textfile or whatever file you are creating for the solar radiation measurement.

Not sure if Cumulus could process this value directly, but I was thinking more that you setup this solar radiation measurement file to be ftp'd to the webserver.

the html files are transferred to the webserver anyway, but the piece of code you need would already be in the template and processed for Cumulus webtags.

once it is on your webserver, when ever a browser is opened on the site it will then read the html file, and pickup the value from the ftp'd file.

Well thats my thinking anyway. Please feel free to help guys or correct me guys. I'm not the one for writing some code to pickup contents of a file to be displayed on a webpage however. though this is possible.

[willyweather]

Thanks a lot for the quick answers and the interesting hints, guys
Well, it looks as if there is no way around digging into the html files and modifying those appropriately one way or the other (which is at the moment well above my knowledge)
So I have to and will learn more about html and java script basics, which might take a while ...

One additional possibility I thought about ... CumulusMX offers basically the integration of "extra sensors" ... reading the documentation I never understood the details good enough to make use of them. Could that be a possibility ?

regards,
Wilfried

[steve]

"Extra sensors" are those provided as optional extras by the stations which Cumulus supports, and data from them is read from the station along with the standard data.

The only sensors which Cumulus will read in addition to the sensors provded by the configured station are the RG-11 rain sensor, and the Blake-Larsen sun recorder, which provides a count of sunshine hours.

[willyweather]

OK, thanks, Steve

So - as I supposed already - also this is not an alternative to handling my solar values independently from CumulusMX by modifying the HTML files ...

OK, I'll do my very best