Cumulus external interfacing

[Rescueclimber]

I have a fine offset station connected to Cumulus and its fantastic.

Love the displays and the graphs. It works really well.

What I havent been able to work out though is if there is a way of obtaining any I/O's out of cumulus either via RS232 or USB interfaces?

I was looking at the alarm config the other day and thinking it would be great if you could sync up the alarms to some form of I/O panel to operate OEM products.

For example I have a small dam just below our property and its become apparents that if we have 50mm of rain it floods rather substancially. So I was thinking, if I could somehow connected an alaram output to a digital logic board to monitor that condition, and should 50mm or more of rain fall, I could then automatically operate the sluice gate in the dam wall and controlling some of the up river flooding that occurs.

Any input would be great on this idea.

Regards.

[uncle_bob]

Some clever clogs person may be able to write some thing up by scanning the realtime.txt or some other file.

Me, I'd interface to the weather station directly by running a relay off the pizo buzzer

[steve]

Another possibility would be to use an xAP i/o device driven from the xAP broadcasts which Cumulus generates.

[Rescueclimber]

Taking an output off the piezo is a fair idea, however I dont hink it will go down too well in the house if i run any more wires from my station.

I had to do a seriously neat installation and hide all the USB cables in order to be permitted to have my weather station installed inside the house as it is haha.

I would prefer some sort of interface that I could set limits to etc from the pc.

I can build the logic interface pcb no problem, but when it comes to the software side of things I have absolutely no clue where to start

[Rescueclimber]

xAP sound interesting.

Did a quick net search for xAP and some reading.

Not sure I understand fully how it works, as there doesnt seem to be a generic xAP application that I can see.

Will do some more searching thanks

[steve]

The schema for the weather report is here: http://www.xapautomation.org/index.php? ... her_Schema

Note that Cumulus produces the 'original' report (or those parts of it that it is able to produce); at some point I'll get around to doing the changes required to produce the updated version.

I'm afraid I know very little about the practical aspects of xAP.

[AllyCat]

Taking an output off the piezo is a fair idea, however I dont think it will go down too well in the house if i run any more wires from my station.
...
I would prefer some sort of interface that I could set limits to etc from the pc.

I can build the logic interface pcb no problem, but when it comes to the software side of things I have absolutely no clue where to start

Hi,

Yes, I'd also be more "comfortable" with a hardware solution and would drive a small radio transmitter (perhaps 868MHz if you have a 434 MHz FO station, and vice versa) indirectly from the sounder connections. Alarm thresholds can be set directly on the Console or (better) via the Easyweather software. I have mine set to sound with the first tip of the rain gauge (each hour).

You probably can't totally avoid getting your hands dirty with some software for a wireless interface, but might find the PICaxe Forum of help.

Cheers, Alan.

[AllyCat]

Double-post deleted

[Rescueclimber]

Taking an output off the piezo is a fair idea, however I dont think it will go down too well in the house if i run any more wires from my station.
...
I would prefer some sort of interface that I could set limits to etc from the pc.

I can build the logic interface pcb no problem, but when it comes to the software side of things I have absolutely no clue where to start

Hi,

Yes, I'd also be more "comfortable" with a hardware solution and would drive a small radio transmitter (perhaps 868MHz if you have a 434 MHz FO station, and vice versa) indirectly from the sounder connections. Alarm thresholds can be set directly on the Console or (better) via the Easyweather software. I have mine set to sound with the first tip of the rain gauge (each hour).

You probably can't totally avoid getting your hands dirty with some software for a wireless interface, but might find the PICaxe Forum of help.

Cheers, Alan.

That's not a bad idea, however you will have a single output for the option of multiple alarms, where as with an I/O interface to a pc directly linked to the alarm panel of Cumulus, I could then run multiple devices for multiple alarms.

I would hate for the flood gates of the dam to open when my high temperature alarm goes off, or my my attic vent windows to open when the rainfall exceeds 50mm.

developing the wireless side isn't a big deal, but I would rather have a panel that I can connect to the RS232 port on the pc, and then hardwire controller contacts into that board. From there a wireless link to the dam wall can be used.