Cumulus Support

The Pi is a cheap, low-power platform that you can leave running 24 hours a day without the cost and noise of a desktop PC. It's ideal for running Cumulus MX. You don't think so?

No, I agree with you, although I leave my windows 10 machine on pretty much all the time so the benefit in terms of power consumption isn't really there for me most of the time. The noise is not an issue as it is not perceptible in my laptop (maybe helped by a solid state drive?) - mind you being partially deaf helps too. One real benefit of having the station connected via the pi is it keeps cumulus isolated from my work - eg if I am having issues with the W10 laptop and it needs reboots or needs to spend time with the techs, these don't interfere with the weather station. And of course when I take the laptop away on trips the pi will be invaluable! I also find the WMR200 lost its connection to the laptop every now and then so I am hoping the pi will be more reliable in that sense. If I was a little wealthier I'd get a decent station like the Davis VP2. Maybe one day I'll just bite that bullet ...

steve wrote:I don't have a Pi with a GUI running at the moment (my Pi2 was killed by a thunderstorm) so I can't try this myself at the moment. To be honest, I didn't really expect anyone to be using the Cumulus UI on the Pi itself anyway - the Pi is a great little device, but it's not really a desktop replacement.

It's not a big deal. I think the browsers on the PI are limited. I tried Net Surf and it won't even open the CumulusMX interface at all. None of the live data loads. I tried to install Chromium but I get an error when installing it. I run headless most of the time and the CumulusMX interface loads fine every time on all my PC's in any browser.

The only time I run on the Pi directly is to use the GUI with file manager to do some things. I was just curious if others saw the same issue or if there was something hosed in my Raspbian installation. It sounds like a Pi limitation.

I have been running CumulusMX on my PI3 successfully for over a month. It's a very neat solution to put a station on the Internet.

I don't even have the GUI loaded on my pi, I run a minimal CLI only distro. Any file management I need to do is easy from a Windows box via WinSCP.

mcrossley wrote:I don't even have the GUI loaded on my pi, I run a minimal CLI only distro. Any file management I need to do is easy from a Windows box via WinSCP.

I will probably do that eventually. I have a 16 GB SD card and memory is not an issue yet. The GUI was nice at first but I am using it less as I become more familiar with Linux.

mcrossley wrote:I don't even have the GUI loaded on my pi, I run a minimal CLI only distro. Any file management I need to do is easy from a Windows box via WinSCP.

What distro are you running? I tried using raspi-config to boot to the terminal only window in Debian Jessie and CMX runs fine.

I'm running the official Jessie Lite, with some packages removed, and added mono etc for CumulusMX and NginX and PHP for my web server.

mcrossley wrote:I'm running the official Jessie Lite, with some packages removed, and added mono etc for CumulusMX and NginX and PHP for my web server.

OK, thanks. I have a spare SD card. I might download the image file and give it a try this weekend.