New VP2- Protecting Old Data

[krmidas]

I'm sure this question has been asked 1,000 times, so forgive me. I'm having Davis re-furbish my VP2 which has been in use since '05. Once I receive my new ISS and console and hook it up, I want to make sure I don't lose all my previous data, records, etc. Not clear once I run Cumulus for the first time if this data will be over-written by the new console or not.

Any advice?

-Tom

[mcrossley]

Nope, your old data is safe, you will just have a gap until the new unit is connected. (But as always you should be regularly backing up your Cumulus folder)

Don't forget to set the logger interval on your new console before connecting up Cumulus.

[krmidas]

Are you referring to the setting on the right side of the Cumulus setup menu?

Capture.PNG

[mcrossley]

Well, yes and no.
You need to set the VP2 console logging interval to be the same 10 minutes as you have set in Cumulus.
You can do this from the WeatherLink software if you have it installed, or from a terminal emulator connected to the serial port if you feel up that - you have to use the SETPER 10 command to set it to 10 minutes.

[HansR]

Could you elaborate on that SETPER 10 command? What is that and where can I find that. Does it belong to a Davis commandset?

[mcrossley]

Hi, it is a standard Davis command SETPER = Set Period

[HansR]

Interesting. I have no idea how to send commands to the Davis and Google seems to have never heard of it either.
Any idea where I can find the documentation about it (and possibly other commands?)
(there is one (1) old discussion from 2017 on this forum about this)

[freddie]

Google Davis serial protocol

[HansR]

Yes. I even had the doc in my library
Point is I never thought of communicating with the davis through the commandline.
But I got it... Thnx

[freddie]

It's great There's even a command to switch on the light in your console I wrote software to extract data from my VP2 using the serial protocol. But then I discovered Cumulus and used it, and stopped work on my own software.

[HansR]

[...] But then I discovered Cumulus and used it, and stopped work on my own software.

Yes, been there done that...
But that was long ago (actually after first using other software).

[krmidas]

6 weeks after sending my VP2 to Davis for service, I received it and put it back into service.

I followed instructions for clearing all data from the console ("Clear All Command") before launching Cumulus. Despite this, it downloaded all the strange data from when the station was in service at Davis Instruments.

What's the best way to remove all the data from the days the station was "offline"? Should I delete those days from the dayfile editor? Should I overwrite the data folder with the last folder I saved before I sent the station in for service?

-Tom

[krmidas]

I was able to purge most of the bad data by first deleting the "bad" days in the dayfile.txt, correcting the corrupted "all-time records", then shutting down Cumulus and deleting several files in the data folder. Finally I deleted some of the NOAA reports from my server, so they would re-generate without the bad data.

At this point, the only bad piece of data is an erroneous entry for the number of consecutive wet days that was caused by the spoons tripping during the ISS install, but I can live with that.

It's odd that the process of clearing the console, which should have prevented this headache, didn't actually clear it, despite the confirmation message the console displayed.

-Tom

[mcrossley]

I suspect that the clear all just clears the console stats, it does not clear out the logger data.

What you could have done was to edit the [General] section of today.ini to reflect the time you wanted to restart from, then it would ignore everything in the logger before that point.

[krmidas]

Your method sounds much simpler!

Silly question: where is the "logger"? I assumed the old data lived in the console until it was downloaded on to my computer.