Migration underway
Posted: Sat 22 Oct 2016 12:16 pm
I have been running Cumulus since late 2011, which has been running almost continuously apart from about a month in 2012 when we moved house. The station is a Davis Vantage Pro2 with Solar and UV. The current PC is a Fujitsu Siemens Pentium 4 2.5GHz, running Windows XP, sat behind a multi-layered firewall, feeding my website, WOW and WU. I have three of the machines, all cast off from work. The first died of PSU failure. This is the second, but has been occasionally switched to the third, to save the wear. I have the steel series gauges running on the website, which are just brilliant.
I am working on a project to create a wall mounted, multi-scaled analogue weather gauge using a stepper motor, controlled by a raspberry pi. This reads the JSON file from the website and provides a facility where you can use buttons to select if the gauge reads temperature, pressure, wind speed or wind direction. The plan is also to have a small LCD display to provide other information. I have one mate who kindly created the scale legend on AutoCAD and another mate is going to CNC machine the wooden back plate to hold all this together, look the part and be able to hang on the wall. This is a project in progress. I have the first prototype built using a RP2, on breadboards, using a mocked up analogue display and wires everywhere, all working nicely. The application is coded in Python3. I plan to start the second prototype, which moves over to a PI Zero and tidies things up a bit. Once this is done I hope to get on and design the final packaging.
Anyway, before this I aim to retire the PC and use a RP2, with an external USB HDD to run Cumulus. The equipment lives in my back bedroom, which, if the door is left closed, heats up nicely in the day due to the power consumption of the PC. It is this power consumption that I aim to reduce. I would have done this before but the problem was quite simply that I could find no other application that does anywhere near as good a job as Cumulus. I see there are ways to run x86 shells on the PI, then run WINE, then run Cumulus. I'm not sure "run"would be the word, more like hobble I suspect. I didn't bother trying as I guessed it would very likely be unusable. The discovery of CumulusMX is just outstanding, and another Donation is on its way. Sure there maybe a few features to contend with but I am happy to help with this beta testing. Raspberry PI, here we come.
Many thanks,
Dave
I am working on a project to create a wall mounted, multi-scaled analogue weather gauge using a stepper motor, controlled by a raspberry pi. This reads the JSON file from the website and provides a facility where you can use buttons to select if the gauge reads temperature, pressure, wind speed or wind direction. The plan is also to have a small LCD display to provide other information. I have one mate who kindly created the scale legend on AutoCAD and another mate is going to CNC machine the wooden back plate to hold all this together, look the part and be able to hang on the wall. This is a project in progress. I have the first prototype built using a RP2, on breadboards, using a mocked up analogue display and wires everywhere, all working nicely. The application is coded in Python3. I plan to start the second prototype, which moves over to a PI Zero and tidies things up a bit. Once this is done I hope to get on and design the final packaging.
Anyway, before this I aim to retire the PC and use a RP2, with an external USB HDD to run Cumulus. The equipment lives in my back bedroom, which, if the door is left closed, heats up nicely in the day due to the power consumption of the PC. It is this power consumption that I aim to reduce. I would have done this before but the problem was quite simply that I could find no other application that does anywhere near as good a job as Cumulus. I see there are ways to run x86 shells on the PI, then run WINE, then run Cumulus. I'm not sure "run"would be the word, more like hobble I suspect. I didn't bother trying as I guessed it would very likely be unusable. The discovery of CumulusMX is just outstanding, and another Donation is on its way. Sure there maybe a few features to contend with but I am happy to help with this beta testing. Raspberry PI, here we come.
Many thanks,
Dave
This is absolutely fantastic work and a major upgrade over Cumulus 1, which was very good in itself to be fair!