Page 1 of 1

Rainfall error on new MX installation

Posted: Wed 15 Jun 2016 7:48 am
by cvzyl
Hi Steve

I am using a WMR200 station with your CMX software. I used to run Cumulus on Windows but installed CMX on an RPi2 2 days ago. In general it is working quite well. One thing that is problematic is the rainfall calculation, there is something seriously wrong. In the screenshot you will see that the rainfall this month is more than 3 000mm, luckily that is not true. In fact we only had about 25mm rain over the last two days.

Image

What could be causing the problem?

Something else, last night outside temperature, humidity and dewpoint stopped indicating. I thought it coincided with a restart of the RPi but am not sure about it. I also checked on the weather station console and it is also not indicating any information there. I suspect it could be due to the extended cloudy conditions we've had for the last 2 days resulting in the rechargeable batteries of the transmitters running down. What is strange however is that wind and pressure information is still received, are they not feeding from the same power unit?
I edited the cumulus.ini file to include the NoSensorCheck=1 to as a temporary fix.

Thanks for your assistance.
Cobus

Re: Rainfall error on new MX installation

Posted: Wed 15 Jun 2016 8:01 am
by water01
I notice you are using a comma as a decimal point (known as decimal comma). If you read the FAQ and the outstanding issues here https://cumulus.hosiene.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=12943 it states there are problems with decimal commas in both the interface and the MX engine which have not been fixed, and the advice as far as I remember is to resort to the UK standard of a decimal point.

Re: Rainfall error on new MX installation

Posted: Wed 15 Jun 2016 8:05 am
by cvzyl
Thanks water01. So the solution is to change from decimal comma to decimal point?

Any idea how to do that in Linux? I'm not a Linux geek :oops:

Re: Rainfall error on new MX installation

Posted: Wed 15 Jun 2016 8:46 am
by cvzyl
Ok, managed to change to decimal point by changing locale settings to GB. Rebooted the machine, now rain for the month is >4000mm :shock: :o

Seems like it jumps by hundreds of mm every time I reboot the RPi? Anyone had this problem before?

Re: Rainfall error on new MX installation

Posted: Wed 15 Jun 2016 2:40 pm
by steve
You will probably have to do some editing of the rainfall data, as in the FAQs and wiki, having changed from commas to decimal points. Your ini files will also need editing, most likely. Once you have everything corrected, if you still have an issue going forward, please zip up the mx diags folder and attach it. I may not be able to look at the files until next week, I am on holiday.

Re: Rainfall error on new MX installation

Posted: Wed 15 Jun 2016 3:14 pm
by cvzyl
Hi steve

Thanks for your reply. I edited the ini files in the data folder but decided to just backup the .txt files and let CMX start fresh. However, on restarting CMX (did not restart the Pi) I am now back at decimal comma!
Don't know why this happened. Is there anybody who can tell me how I can reliably change my Linux system to use only decimal point?

Cobus

Re: Rainfall error on new MX installation

Posted: Wed 15 Jun 2016 4:08 pm
by steve
The best way is to change the system locale to en-gb (or whatever it's actually called) and there is a utility on the Pi to allow you to do this - raspi-config, I think.

Re: Rainfall error on new MX installation

Posted: Wed 15 Jun 2016 5:22 pm
by cvzyl
Thanks steve, using the config tool did not work. I finally edited /etc/environment to LC_ALL=en_GB.UTF-8. I'll monitor it for a while, see what happens on reboots.

At the moment the annual and monthly totals are not increasing on reboots. I edited the ini file to show YTD=100, still maintaining that. Let's see if it's sorted.

Re: Rainfall error on new MX installation

Posted: Wed 15 Jun 2016 7:40 pm
by steve
It may be unable to sum the daily totals in dayfile.txt, if so there will be error messages in the diags file. You may well have incompatible formats in the data logs.