Newbie Help please

[suffolkblue]

Hello I'm brand new and rather daft . I am going to be getting a AWS from Maplin I have heard that this software will work with it but my silly question is how will the weather station communicate with cumulus. Obviously the WS will have a lead from the indoor station which can Lead to my Pc via a USB. So for this to communicate for live online data will my pc need to be on all the time or is there another way of linking it up via wi-fi etc. Any help please thank you.

[steve]

The weather station communicates with Cumulus via the USB cable. If you want to upload the data to a web site, and want that data to be up to date 24 hours a day, then you will have to have your PC powered up 24 hours a day. You can close Cumulus down and power off the PC, but obviously it will not then be able to update your web site. When you start it up again, it will download the data from the station to catch up from when it closed down, and start updating your web site again.

[suffolkblue]

Thank you very much. So when I go onto your weather sites.websites and a lot of the stations are showing current data does this mean their pc's are on?. Also if I set my WS to cumulus does it show history and how often do I need to plug the WS into the computer. Sorry for being thick but thanks for your help so far it means a lot.

[steve]

Thank you very much. So when I go onto your weather sites.websites and a lot of the stations are showing current data does this mean their pc's are on?

Yes.

Also if I set my WS to cumulus does it show history

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this, but it logs the data to log files, and generates and displays high/low etc statistics.

and how often do I need to plug the WS into the computer.

It depends on the interval that you set the station's logger to. It holds 4080 entries before the oldest starts getting overwritten, so you can work out what period that will cover for various intervals. For example, at a 5 minute interval, which is a reasonable choice, that's just over two weeks.

[suffolkblue]

Ok thank you when I get sorted I will post an update. I was going to get a vantage vue but my wallet would not let me.