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Instructions: Installing CumulusMX on Raspberry Pi

From build 3044 the development baton passed to Mark Crossley. Mark has been responsible for all the Builds since. He has made the code available on GitHub. It is Mark's hope that others will join in this development, but at the very least he welcomes your ideas for future developments (see Cumulus MX Development suggestions).

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mcrossley
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Re: Instructions: Installing CumulusMX on Raspberry Pi

Post by mcrossley »

Because you are running MX in the current foreground session, when you log off the session gets closed, and MX along with it.

You have two options (once you are happy it starts-up OK, always best to do this in the foreground session)...

1. Run it as a service under systemd - instructions in this thread: viewtopic.php?p=146028#p146028

2. Install "screen" - >apt-get install screen
a. Start a new screen session - >screen
b. Run MX in this session as you do normally
c. Detach from the screen session - Ctrl-a, d
d. You can then log off
e. To get back to the screen session, log-in again, and execute >screen -r
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Re: Instructions: Installing CumulusMX on Raspberry Pi

Post by ExperiMentor »

The behaviour you describe is normal. You start Cumulus; it runs until you either press Ctrl-C in Putty to interrupt it (then you will get the command prompt back) or close Putty (when all running programs will stop).

What you need to do is set CumulusMX to run in the background - that's covered later in the instructions when it suggests editing crontab to reboot each day and start CumulusMX after rebooting - then CumulusMX will be running in a session that you cannot see via Putty (but there's nothing to see after that 'Normal running' message), and it will run until you shut down the Raspberry Pi.

There are others here who use a 'Start/Stop Script' to allow starting and stopping CumulusMX, but personally I never got along well with it (never really understood what it was doing, which I don't like).

As I wrote that, I see Mark has added other methods too ... you have choices
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Re: Instructions: Installing CumulusMX on Raspberry Pi

Post by ExperiMentor »

For your second problem (absent gauges), I don't know. It depends how your website (which we know nothing about?) gets its data. Maybe you simply haven't told CumulusMX to upload the data, or not to the right place, or got a password wrong?
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Re: Instructions: Installing CumulusMX on Raspberry Pi

Post by peterbent55 »

Thanks to Mark and ExperiMentor for your responses. For the time being I've opted to use the "screen" option - that's working for now. As I get more confident with the Pi I'll try the "crontab" route.
Regarding the gauges, everything else uploads to my website, just no data to the gauges, so I'm none the wiser!
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Re: Instructions: Installing CumulusMX on Raspberry Pi

Post by rogerthn »

peterbent55 wrote: Thu 03 Sep 2020 7:04 pm Thanks to Mark and ExperiMentor for your responses. For the time being I've opted to use the "screen" option - that's working for now. As I get more confident with the Pi I'll try the "crontab" route.
Regarding the gauges, everything else uploads to my website, just no data to the gauges, so I'm none the wiser!
Stay with screen until the next release where run as a service will be even better :o
Regarding the gauges on you website, can you share a link to it?
Maybe you are missing e.g. <your url>/lib/steelseries/scripts/gauges.js
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Re: Instructions: Installing CumulusMX on Raspberry Pi

Post by water01 »

Have you ticked Settings / Internet Settings / Realtimegauges.txt FTP ?
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Re: Instructions: Installing CumulusMX on Raspberry Pi

Post by peterbent55 »

water01 wrote: Thu 03 Sep 2020 7:59 pm Have you ticked Settings / Internet Settings / Realtimegauges.txt FTP ?
Yes, I discovered this earlier today and selected it, but still no data on gauges. Nor is there a proper moon phase, just an empty box.
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Re: Instructions: Installing CumulusMX on Raspberry Pi

Post by water01 »

Ok but did you stop and restart MX after setting as I think the cumulus.ini has to be read with that setting, and is the gauges.js pointing at the directory where you are uploading the realtimegauges.txt to?

As to moon image did you set up Settings / Internet Settings / Moon Image correctly with the FTP directory?
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Re: Instructions: Installing CumulusMX on Raspberry Pi

Post by peterbent55 »

rogerthn wrote: Thu 03 Sep 2020 7:27 pm
peterbent55 wrote: Thu 03 Sep 2020 7:04 pm Thanks to Mark and ExperiMentor for your responses. For the time being I've opted to use the "screen" option - that's working for now. As I get more confident with the Pi I'll try the "crontab" route.
Regarding the gauges, everything else uploads to my website, just no data to the gauges, so I'm none the wiser!
Stay with screen until the next release where run as a service will be even better :o
Regarding the gauges on you website, can you share a link to it?
Maybe you are missing e.g. <your url>/lib/steelseries/scripts/gauges.js
I've sorted out the moon image on my website, found that there were 2 settings that needed to be selected and I'd only done one of them. And I've now got the gauges working as well - I'd not got "Enable Realtime" selected. Doh!!
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Re: Instructions: Installing CumulusMX on Raspberry Pi

Post by johnwh46 »

Running CumulusMX on Raspberry Pi Zero - Cumulus MX 3.9.0 b3095 -crashes whenever it tries to post to Twitter [have been unable to post to twitter for some time using previous versions]. Now running well without Twitter enabled.
Have double checked login and password of this my second account

Also
sudo apt install apt-transport-https dirmngr gnupg ca-certificates
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys 3FA7E0328081BFF6A14DA29AA6A19B38D3D831EF
echo "deb https://download.mono-project.com/repo/debian stable-raspbianbuster main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mono-official-stable.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install -y mono-complete
sudo apt autoremove

Entered each line separately

Plug your USB weather station into the Raspberry Pi – USB cable into the OTG connector (probably via an adaptor lead) if using Raspberry Pi Zero W. Fine Offset station output USB A so just use a standard USB A to Micro USB same as a Zero power lead
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Re: Instructions: Installing CumulusMX on Raspberry Pi

Post by freddie »

Twitter update have been broken/intermittent for about two years since Twitter now insist that all users have personal keys which is not handled by MX. @mcrossley may be interested to hear about the crashes, though, so could you zip up the contents of your MXdiags folder and attach to a reply to this topic, please?
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Re: Instructions: Installing CumulusMX on Raspberry Pi

Post by ExperiMentor »

johnwh46 wrote: Sat 17 Oct 2020 9:50 am Plug your USB weather station into the Raspberry Pi – USB cable into the OTG connector (probably via an adaptor lead) if using Raspberry Pi Zero W. Fine Offset station output USB A so just use a standard USB A to Micro USB same as a Zero power lead
Thanks for that - I should have realised that would work and makes the wiring simpler and/or lets you choose the cable length. I have amended the instructions!
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Re: Instructions: Installing CumulusMX on Raspberry Pi

Post by Rylands »

Things have been running perfectly since June, but all of a sudden, NO DATA!!

I THINK this is my setup, but the memory is not as good as it used to be.

I have a Davis VP2 station, and a Raspberry Pi running Cumulus. My webpage uses a Cron job to read the information posted to my server from Cumulus.

It appears that Cumulus has stopped running on my Pi. The data is still being stored on the VP2 station, and the Cron job is still running but reporting erroneus data.

I can see that the Pi is connected to my wifi network at address 192.168.1.24.

When I try to access Cumulus using 192.168.1.24:8998, I get a refused connection message.

When I try to login to the PI (using PuTTY or Filezilla) it doesn't connect. File states "FATAL ERROR: Network error: Connection refused", PuTTy says something similar.

Does anybody have suggestions on where to go to from here?
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Re: Instructions: Installing CumulusMX on Raspberry Pi

Post by freddie »

Your Cron job is running, so the pi sounds okay. Connection refused is commonly associated with either the SSH Daemon stopping on the pi (unlikely) or your network configuration. Can you tell if the pi is listening on port 22 (run nmap from another host)? Have you made any changes to your network recently?
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Re: Instructions: Installing CumulusMX on Raspberry Pi

Post by ExperiMentor »

You haven't really told us enough about your setup. The Davis and CumulusMX running on an RPi on your local network makes sense. But where is 'my webpage' running/hosted? Where is 'my server' running/hosted? And on what machine is the cron job running? I get the impression that at least some of these are remote on the web, rather than all on your RPi or on another local machine.

I think the first things I would try would be rebooting - first of your router (because that is easy) and secondly of the RPi - best if you can do it with a sudo reboot but if not by pulling the power.

It's trying to help avoid issues like this that is why I recommend setting a cron job on the Pi to do a daily reboot. Whilst I don't know exactly what the problem is, a reboot is quite likely to fix it.
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