Cumulus Support

Hello,

I'm wondering if there's a way to use Cumulus to view historical data while it is not connected to a weather station?

The reason I'm asking is because I'm trying to get our new weather station (Vantage Pro Plus) set-up in a school setting. We have one teacher's computer connected to the console, but I'm trying to find a way to have the students view the data and graphs on their computers in the classroom over the network. When I saw how easy the procedure of moving Cumulus to a new computer is, I thought all I had to do was copy the data folder to a shared drive at regular intervals, then the students could just copy that folder to their computer and they would then have all the recent historical data.

As you know, when I tried opening Cumulus on a student computer it gives an error saying it cannot initialize the weather station and then it does not show any data in the graphs. I even tried the ini fix your faq suggested by adding a line in the .ini file but that didn't work either.

Is there something I'm missing? If not, there must be an easy way to modify cumulus to view the graphs even though real-time data is not coming in.

I realize the data can be uploaded to the WeatherLink server and then view offline using that program, but I am really not impressed with WeatherLink. It's very outdated and buggy (it looks at least 20 years old) and I'm almost embarrassed to use it in class.

If it's not possible to do this on Cumulus, what is the best way analyze data from a weather station on many computers at the same time? I can live without the real-time data because I know that can be uploaded to a website, but I really need a program that can view the historical data offline.

If you choose the 'easyweather.dat' station type (you don't need to specify a file), you should be able to achieve what you want, as I suggested to someone else recently: https://cumulus.hosiene.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=10435

Thanks for the quick reply!

It's such a relief do know that Cumulus can do what I'm asking.

I changed the station configuration to easyweather.dat, but Cumulus was still not able to read the historical data in the data folder. From the post you referred to it appears this is all that's required.

Can you give me step by step instructions or point me in the right direction?

Also, I found something about an easyweather.dat realtime grabber. Would that work on the student computers so they have access to the real-time data as well the historical data?

reddog wrote:I changed the station configuration to easyweather.dat, but Cumulus was still not able to read the historical data in the data folder. From the post you referred to it appears this is all that's required.

Yes, that's all that's required, other than making sure that the 'secondary' PC has the same Windows settings (date format, decimal separator etc) as the 'primary' PC. If you zip up the diags folder and attach it, I'll take a look. What 'historical data' are you trying to view, exactly?

Also, I found something about an easyweather.dat realtime grabber. Would that work on the student computers so they have access to the real-time data as well the historical data?

Sorry, I don't know anything about that, I just support Cumulus. Whatever it is, it presumably needs an easyweather.dat file, and you don't have one of those as you have a Davis system and don't use Easyweather.

There's this: https://cumulus.hosiene.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=7087 which works with the Cumulus realtime.txt file, so you should be able to use that.

The 2nd computer is running Windows8 and the computer that is connect to the console is running Windows7, so that's probably causing the problem. I'll look into it further.

Update: Actually it's working. The problem I had 2 days ago is there wasn't enough historical data to show up in the charts. Viewing the data files on another computer is working just fine now, thanks!

Thanks for the link to the realtime data grabber.

I have one more question for you:

We are going to purchase a WeatherLinkIP so we can upload our data automatically to their server. Is it possible to run Cumulus in the offline mode from a student computer, and access the historical data from the WeatherLink server? I guess what I'm asking is if it's possible for Cumulus to download data from WeatherLink? I saw some options for internet settings, but I'm not sure if that's only to upload.

Thanks for bearing with me, I'm familiar with computers but brand new to the weather station and networking...

reddog wrote:Is it possible to run Cumulus in the offline mode from a student computer, and access the historical data from the WeatherLink server? I guess what I'm asking is if it's possible for Cumulus to download data from WeatherLink?

No, this isn't currently possible with Cumulus.

Steve, you've possibly already seen this. But if you look at p36 of the latest (v2.61) of the Serial Tech Ref then details of the Web Download protocol are there. It's basically an HTTP GET, decoding the header and then archive records in the same format as from the logger. So might be relatively easy to implement as a feature request.

Only problem that I can foresee is that Davis might not take kindly to anyone hitting the wl.com server too frequently for an archive download (which would be silly anyway, given that new archive records are only uploaded on an hourly basis), so if this option were ever to be implemented then it might be prudent to limit the frequency that it can be used.

The current version of Cumulus doesn't use the serial protocol. But, yes, I'm aware of the option, and the Davis DLL does have an interface for downloading from weatherlink.com.

steve wrote:The current version of Cumulus doesn't use the serial protocol. But, yes, I'm aware of the option, and the Davis DLL does have an interface for downloading from weatherlink.com.

Ah yes, sorry, I was forgetting!