V.1.7.11

[gwheelo]

Brilliant! But what is going on with the FreeWX wind gauge. It is plotting points all over the dial. Looks as if it is picking up historical daily data. By the end of the day there are so many data points that it takes 30 seconds to draw. See: http://www.wheelocknet.net/cumulus/now.htm . Is that something on my end or is it just what the data tag is picking up?

GW

[steve]

It plots the most recent 3600 samples (it uses the same data as the 'spidergraph' (windrose)). Originally this was going to be one hour's worth (i.e. one per second), but it turned out that it was one point for every value supplied by the weather station.

On the Davis stations wind data is supplied every 2 or 3 seconds, so the graph plots 2 or 3 hours worth. But I think the Oregon stations only supply wind speeds every 12 seconds, so that's 12 hours worth. Neither of these seemed unreasonable. I forget which weather station you have?

But now it's using the same data for these javascript graphs, maybe 3600 points is too many to plot in a browser - I guess it depends on how fast your PC is, mine isn't particularly high spec but it seems to plot them all quite quickly - practically instantaneously. Your page loads quite quickly for me (and most of the time is taken up loading the picture at the top left, which is about half a megabyte). Is it still slow for you?

I'd consider reducing the number of plotted points?

Steve

[gwheelo]

No - let me try it out a few more days. It is just that last evening around 23:00 is took almost 30 seconds to load. It may have been traffic or perhaps the CPU was busy. My rig is reasonably fast. You are correct about the image and I will reduce that for efficiency. Still streamlining the site as we speak. My weather machine is an Oregon 918 - a US model.

Do you still have plans to update the wind data in near real-time.

GW

[steve]

Ok. I guess it's possible that there's a bug and on that occasion it had included many more than the 3600. See how it goes.

The real time display is something I want to progress at some time, but that would be a separate page using the Flash application that I was developing. I guess I could tidy it up and release it with just the wind gauges, since the wind is the only thing that changes quickly enough for a real time display to be useful.

Steve

[garytx]

For what it's worth, my vote would be "yes, please" on the release of the real-time SWF, even with only the wind gauges. Very impressive implementation, Steve!

[gwheelo]

Tested load speed this evening (23:30) and encountered very fast load speeds (immediate) - so don't waste your time trimming the data points. I'm running vista and it has a mind of its own. I really like it but sometimes it just has work of its own to take care of.

Looking forward to the near real-time. Any possibility of running it in a frame on a page. I have not had any experience with building pages with streaming stuff although my webcam streams to a pass worded page on my website. 30 frames a second if the traffic is low. It is the same picture you see on the webcam page but that image is updated only every two minutes. It allows me to pan & tilt from anywhere in the world.

GW

[steve]

I have a love-hate relationship with Vista too, my main PC (i.e. the one I use for developing Cumulus) runs it. SP1 improved things quite a bit, I think.

Regarding putting the SWF gauges in a frame, I had been thinking the same sort of thing myself. It's certainly possible to embed it, so I'll look into doing that.

Steve

[gwheelo]

Or you might cheat as http://lestartit.net/Webcam/ . A simple 6 image GIF simulates real-time on their wind gauge. Update is, in fact, every two minutes. Let's go for the real thing!

GW

[steve]

I've had a go at putting the real time wind gauges into the existing gauges page.

http://www.sanday.org.uk/weather/gauges.htm

Any comments?

Steve

[garytx]

It looks very nice, Steve, and nicely balanced. I presume that since a SWF file is used for the real time gauges, they could be placed anywhere on any page on one's site? For the 1.7.11 release with the instruments pages, I've placed the baro and wind rose at the top of the stack rather than at the bottom, just as they're the more interesting of the mix.

[steve]

Yes, if you look at the source of my gauges page, you'll see the bit that embeds the SWF file - it's an 'object' tag and within that an 'embed' tag. I can't claim to fully understand it, but it's a standard way of embedding SWF. So basically, you could put it anywhere you want.

The SWF is rather basic at the moment, there are no parameters so it assumes you're using mph, the date format is always dd/mm/yy and you can't change the colours or anything. But I'll probably make it and the new gauges template available shortly anyway (it works with the existing release of Cumulus).

Steve

[gwheelo]

Great - however I prefer the indicator needle on the original wind speed - looks more professional rather than the dress tie version - in any case, I am ready!

If the 928 updates every 14 seconds can we we xpect that for indicator updating as well!

GW

[steve]

I can change the needle, probably even offer a choice of styles and colours etc. And the gauges probably need two needles for latest and average.

Currently the update interval is fixed in the SWF file at 3 seconds, so with Cumulus set to the same interval, for Davis stations it's pretty much a new value each update. But for Oregon stations it will only change every four or five updates at the current 3 second setting.

I'll attach the SWF and the new gauges template to this post, but basically, to make it work, you need to upload the SWF file to your web site to the same place as your web pages, turn on Cumulus Realtime in the internet settings, and add the following code to a web page:

Code: Select all

      <object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
			id="CumulusRealtime" width="600" height="300"
			codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/swflash.cab">
			<param name="movie" value="CumulusRealtime.swf" />
			<param name="quality" value="high" />
			<param name="bgcolor" value="#869ca7" />
			<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />
			<embed src="CumulusRealtime.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#869ca7"
				width="600" height="300" name="CumulusRealtime" align="middle"
				play="true"
				loop="false"
				quality="high"
				allowScriptAccess="sameDomain"
				type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
				pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer">
			</embed>
      </object>

Steve

[gwheelo]

When adding gaugesT.htm to the web folder - do I need to add a reference in the user template section or will Cumulus find it due to the capital "T".

When setting the near-real-time box - you mentioned the Real-time is hard wired for the present- - so I expect there is nothing there to set.

GW

[gwheelo]

When adding gaugesT.htm to the web folder - do I need to add a reference in the user template section or will Cumulus find it due to the capital "T".

When setting the near-real-time box - you mentioned the Real-time is hard wired for the present- - so I expect there is nothing there to set.

GW