Cumulus Support

Hi: I have an Ambient Weather 2090 weather station that works just fine until some random event when it will stop downloading data to the computer running Cumulus. I've contacted Ambient Weather about this and they say it is a common problem among all USB weather stations. While I'm not certain if that's the case, I have found a way to resolve the problem: remove the batteries from the weather station console to restart it. Unfortunately, that means that until I can get around to the console to remove the batteries and restart it, that I'm not reporting weather data to Weather Underground. So, I decided to do a bit of experimentation. I removed the batteries from the console, but kept the USB plugged in. It keeps the device powered. Then, I rebooted the computer, and during the reboot, the console was restarted too. Since it appears that Cumulus doesn't care about the date/time on the console (and neither do I) that I don't need to set the time/date on the console for proper reporting to Weather Underground (I'm assuming that Cumulus is using the computer's time/date for the time stamp as opposed to the console's time and date.) And, a reboot of the computer and the subsequent reboot of the console resets everything and data downloads happen as expected.

What would be really cool is if I could have Cumulus reboot the computer after say 10 minutes of failed downloads. Is there way to make this happen?

It may be possible, I'd have to investigate when I have time. It's not really something I'd be happy putting into Cumulus, though. But I'll consider it. Presumably your USB port isn't powered while the PC is rebooting?

Are you using the "Synchronise Fine Offset Reads" setting? That prevents some of the station lockups which can occur.

You could create a scheduled task to monitor a file output from Cumulus that contains the <#DataStopped> tag, and initiate a reboot if it stays like that for say 10 minutes.

steve wrote:It may be possible, I'd have to investigate when I have time. It's not really something I'd be happy putting into Cumulus, though. But I'll consider it. Presumably your USB port isn't powered while the PC is rebooting?

Are you using the "Synchronise Fine Offset Reads" setting? That prevents some of the station lockups which can occur.

I just set the "Synchronise Fine Offset Reads". I had not been using it before. I'll see if that resolves the problem (following Murphy's Law, it seems that as soon as we get a big enough weather anomaly that I really want to have data for (like it starts to rain in San Diego), the station console stops downloading to the computer.)

Yes, the USB port isn't powered when the PC reboots, so the station console resets upon reboot. While having the computer reboot automatically isn't ideal, it at least makes it easier than having to remove the batteries from the console and disconnect from the USB just to get the station reporting again, and if it was done automatically, it would lose a few minutes of data rather than what is sometimes a day or more of data.