Rain counter at the start of a new month

[Peasantmk2]

I've been using Cumulus for just under a month now, and so far it's been really good. OK, I've had the odd glitch, but nothing that caused major hassle, and I've usually found an explanation on the forums/FAQ/Wiki that has sorted things out. There is one thing that I've not been able to find an answer for so far though.

My PC was switched off on 31st October, and wasn't turned on again until 3rd November. Cumulus downloaded the data from the IPlogger on my Davis Vantage Pro 2 console as usual, but the rainfall was miles out. I traced this back to the rain counter figure. If I open the monthly data log viewer for November, the rain counter figure at 0.00 on 1/11/14 shows 615. At 0.30 it is 0, and it increments as rain falls over the next two days. When I switched on the PC, and the data was retrieved, the rain counter figure jumped up to 623.8. To correct my data I had to manually change the figures for total rainfall in the November log file.

Is this normal behaviour if the PC is switched off at month changeover or do I have something odd going on? Data interval is set at 30 mins on both Cumulus and the console.

Thanks in anticipation

[steve]

You have something odd going on, it looks like an issue with how Cumulus picked up the rain counter from where it left off, as it can't get it directly from the archive data. If you zip up the diags folder and attach it, I'll take a look.

[Peasantmk2]

Thanks for the quick reply. Zip file attached as requested.

[steve]

You closed Cumulus down just before midnight. It tries to cope with most combinations of starting and stopping, and switching between logger data and live data, but closing down just before midnight is one thing that unfortunately causes problems because of the way the end of day code works, which is why the readme.txt warns against it. "Just before" in this context means between the last station logger entry and midnight; as you have a relatively long archive interval of 30 minutes, your last logger entry for the day is at 23:30, so you should avoid closing Cumulus down after 23:30, until a few minutes after midnight.

[Peasantmk2]

t tries to cope with most combinations of starting and stopping, and switching between logger data and live data, but closing down just before midnight is one thing that unfortunately causes problems because of the way the end of day code works, which is why the readme.txt warns against it.

Ah, consider my knuckles well and truly rapped I did read the readme.txt, but it was a while ago, and I didn't think to look there for the answer this time. I'll watch out for that next time thanks. Next time I'm that close to midnight I'll just have another beer until I know it's safe to shut down Cumulus

Thanks again for your help. Donation on its way as I type.

[steve]

I do understand that there's a lot of stuff in the readme and it's not easy to remember it all later. For this particular issue, I guess it could pop up a warning if you try to close it down at a bad time. Ideally, though, I'd change the code to remove this restriction altogether, and hopefully I'll get around to doing that eventually.

Many thanks for the donation