Advice for new user migrating from Weather Display

[SpireWeather]

Hi everyone, I've just registered with this forum as I'm considering migrating from Weather Display to Cumulus.
I've been running Weather Display for 2 years but am becoming increasingly frustrated with the complexity of the software and less than perfect support!  I simply want to log & display my weather data in a reliable, tidy & easy-to-read format & from what I've seen it looks as though Cumulus fits the bill.  WD produces a lot of spikes & errors which I am constantly having to correct.  These may of course be caused by my ageing WMR928N station but can anyone comment on whether Cumulus is more stable & reliable than Weather Display?
I do have a few questions before taking the plunge: -
1. Is it possible to migrate my existing data to Cumulus?  If not I can simply display the data up to the point I switch, then present new data & graphics from then on.
2. One if the most useful features of Weather Display is the ability to overlay weather data on the webcam image.  How easy us this to do with Cumulus?
3. It looks as though much of the data displayed on the Cumulus web page templates forms part of the web page rather than as an uploaded image.  I run my weather station from a low power PC away from my house, and build and upload my web site at home using images uploaded by Weather Display, so it's not practical to create my site using tags on the weather PC.  I suppose I could display the uploaded Cumulus web pages within frames on my site but this isn't ideal.  I'd appreciate some advice from anyone that's designed their own sites using Cumulus data.
4. I currently upload to the Met Office WOW site - is this included in the latest stable Cumulus build or should I use the latest beta?
5. I've seen a comment from Steve that he is unlikely to be doing any further work on Cumulus 2. Does this mean that development of Cumulus is not going to continue?
Thanks in advance for any help - I'm quite looking forward to this project!
Simon
SpireWeather

[steve]

1. Is it possible to migrate my existing data to Cumulus?

No, I'm afraid not.

2. One if the most useful features of Weather Display is the ability to overlay weather data on the webcam image.  How easy us this to do with Cumulus?

Cumulus doesn't have any webcam facilities built in, but I know that a number of users do run webcams, and do overlay Cumulus data on the images. Someone who is doing this will be able to advise (and there's a dedicated webcam section of the forum).

3. It looks as though much of the data displayed on the Cumulus web page templates forms part of the web page rather than as an uploaded image.  I run my weather station from a low power PC away from my house, and build and upload my web site at home using images uploaded by Weather Display, so it's not practical to create my site using tags on the weather PC.  I suppose I could display the uploaded Cumulus web pages within frames on my site but this isn't ideal.  I'd appreciate some advice from anyone that's designed their own sites using Cumulus data.

I don't really understand what it is you would want to do here - if the weather station software can upload images, why can't it upload web pages? Or perhaps just data, which is read by PHP pages etc.

4. I currently upload to the Met Office WOW site - is this included in the latest stable Cumulus build or should I use the latest beta?

WOW support is in the 1.9.2 beta.

5. I've seen a comment from Steve that he is unlikely to be doing any further work on Cumulus 2. Does this mean that development of Cumulus is not going to continue?

I can't give any promises about what I'll do in the future, or how long I'll continue developing Cumulus, but at the moment I'm continuing to work on Cumulus 1.

[SpireWeather]

Thanks for the reply Steve,

Regarding the web site query, my web PC is a very low power fit-PC Slim that I access by remote access - it does have the capability of uploading web pages but designing web pages on there would be painfully slow.

I don't have a huge knowledge of HTML or CSS and designing pages from scratch using tags is daunting for me! Most of the data that Weather Display produces is via jpg or gif images that are uploaded to the server on a regular basis. I therefore design my pages using NetObjects Fusion Essentials on a faster PC, using the images pulled from my server. It seems to work well.

I love the standard templates that Cumulus produces - they are clean and well presented, but do not match the current theme of my site - see http://www.spireweather.co.uk. I suppose I could always redesign my site to match Cumulus .

Regards,

Simon

[steve]

You wouldn't need to design the pages on the weather PC; create them locally, then copy them to the weather PC so that it can upload them. You could extract the 'meat' of the standard Cumulus pages, insert that into one of your existing pages, and adjust the CSS so it would fit better with your existing web site style. That probably sounds a bit daunting, but it's not too hard, and a number of people have done similar things already, so I'm sure there would be plenty of help available.

[SpireWeather]

OK, well at least I know there are possibilities - I suppose using tags in my own pages could make them even more flexible.

Thanks.

[philcdav]

Hi Spire

welcome to the forum.

As usual Steve has covered the corners

But anyway, have a look here to see the best of both worlds ..

http://www.philcdav.webspace.virginmedi ... ther2.html

It all runs on a 10 year old XP laptop.

The html is very basic and mostly cribbed from FREE sources but its easy to maintain.

Good luck and call if u need more info

[SpireWeather]

Thanks for that Phil,

I too like the standard Cumulus pages & might well put them as frames in my existing site.

Regards,

Simon

[yv1hx]

1. Is it possible to migrate my existing data to Cumulus?  If not I can simply display the data up to the point I switch, then present new data & graphics from then on.

Hello Simon,

As far as I can remember, there is a facility in to WD software for exporting the database to text files. From this point you can "reconstruct" the data log files to Cumulus format. They are sufficiently well explained in the Wiki.

I was in the same predicament than you when I move to Cumulus, because I don't want to throw away 2 and a half years of data logging.

Good luck!