Can i add other data sources to Cumulus

[paulm]

Hi,

Just got my Maplin N96GY for Christmas. Its up and running and using cumulus all ok. Ive managed to install some weather by you templates and get realtime working with Pocket PWS on my Android phone.

All in all pretty happy.

The question i have is can i add other data to be collected by Cumulus?

I also have a Raspberry Pi which monitors some other temperature locations and i wondered if i could integrate the results. I was thinking of adding a crude daylight sensor for example.

I could just send my the data I have to the same web site but it would be nice to integrate it some how.


p.s. i would also be interested in seeing Cumulus on Raspberry Pi. I did get Pywws running but it seemed more effort for my web skills. Also with Linux the inbuilt capabilities and tools would make a lot of the third party apps much easier to develop.

Paul

[steve]

There are only two 'add on' sensors which Cumulus supports, the RG-11 rain gauge and the Blake-Larsen Sun Recorder. To get Cumulus to automatically integrate your additional data and do something useful with it, you would have to supply it in the way that those devices do. One of the things that the B-L Sun Recorder does in fact, is to determine whether it's currently sunny, so that at least sounds hopeful. It passes its data to Cumulus by updating a file in the Cumulus folder. I can't remember the exact format at the moment (it's very simple).

[PaulMy]

I have the BL Sunrecorder and the file SRsunshine.dat is in the Cumulus data folder. The 4 lines of data is:
1.23
3.12
9.17
True

which I believe is:
Sunshine today - in hrs
Recorded time today - in hrs
Day length today - in hrs, calculated by the SR program
Is sunshine now

Paul

[paulm]

Thanks for the replies.

I think i could manage to create a similar file. How often is it updated.?

Paul

[PaulMy]

Looks like the SR program updates the file every 1 minute to my Cumulus\data folder but not sure when uploaded. I don't believe it is part of the realtime.txt update so presume it is sent by Cumulus at the normal update interval which in my case is every 5 minutes.

Paul

[steve]

Note that Cumulus only uses the first and last items, and reads the file once a minute. It just uses the data to replace the two items that it would calculate for itself on stations with solar sensors (i.e. hours of sunshine today, and whether it's currently sunny).

[PaulMy]

Thanks Steve for clarifying. It has been working perfect so really hadn't thought about it.

Paul

[paulm]

Hi both.

I just dumped a dummy SRSunshine.dat file in the data directory and i can see its processed it and copied into today.ini so ill get my raspberry pi to dump some data into this file and see how i go.

Thanks.
Paul