Cumulus Support

Hello I'm new to Cumulus. I come from WD which has been fine for a long time but when I switched to Windows 7 the data logging download wouldn't work anymore due to an incompatibility, which is essential for my use, never solved so Cumulus is my only chance now.

I like Cumulus for its lightness and rapidity to download stored data but before switching I like to solve any doubt.
According to my current WD usage, does Cumulus..?:
- store ALL the data in an unique text/cvs file (every 1 min) with simple stuff like time,temp,hum,baro,dewpoint,rainfall ect that could be in some way customized? I need this to have a complete log and to show an archive on the website
- in my website I use an automatic update every 1 min which works in sync with WD that sends a customized "custom tags" file having data I want to show. Does Cumulus have those "tags" for the web I can save in a file every min and upload? The tags would be except for the obvious stuff things like trends for every possibile value (change in the hour), max and min of the day for every value and time, current weather and weather description (sunny, cloudy, showers, heavy rain, fog - some conditions except for rain is set by the METAR), rain in day, last 10 min, last hour, windrun, windgust last min, clouds base and all those particular values...

I know that many of them could be calculated manually (that's what WD does in the end) but some would be really complicated to recreate!

I'm using WS2350 which I know has some problems with Cumulus, in fact I get in all time records min temp of -25,6°C but this was never even recorded in the logfile so where does it come from?

Is it true that in Cumulus 2 the DB file would be canceled? How I am gonna show a database online if I don't have a file anymore? will Cumulus 1 be abandoned?

Thanks

Sandro wrote:- store ALL the data in an unique text/cvs file (every 1 min) with simple stuff like time,temp,hum,baro,dewpoint,rainfall ect that could be in some way customized? I need this to have a complete log and to show an archive on the website

The formats of the log files are in the wiki, here: http://wiki.sandaysoft.com/index.php?ti ... :Log_Files
They're also in the help file, but you would need to install Cumulus to access that. The two 'data' log files are the 'monthly log files' and 'dayfile.txt'.

- in my website I use an automatic update every 1 min which works in sync with WD that sends a customized "custom tags" file having data I want to show. Does Cumulus have those "tags" for the web I can save in a file every min and upload? The tags would be except for the obvious stuff things like trends for every possibile value (change in the hour), max and min of the day for every value and time, current weather and weather description (sunny, cloudy, showers, heavy rain, fog - some conditions except for rain is set by the METAR), rain in day, last 10 min, last hour, windrun, windgust last min, clouds base and all those particular values...

The web tags are documented in the help file, and in the wiki here: http://wiki.sandaysoft.com/index.php?title=Webtags - I'm sure WD has many more tags than Cumulus.

I'm using WS2350 which I know has some problems with Cumulus, in fact I get in all time records min temp of -25,6°C but this was never even recorded in the logfile so where does it come from?

Not every value that's read goes into the log files - data is read every few seconds but the minimum log interval is 1 minute. Are you using a USB/serial adapter?

Is it true that in Cumulus 2 the DB file would be canceled? How I am gonna show a database online if I don't have a file anymore?

Cumulus 2 uses an SQLite database. I haven't yet worked out every detail of how this will work, but there will undoubtedly be ways of automatically exporting the data in various formats at set intervals.

will Cumulus 1 be abandoned?

No. At the very least I will continue to support it and fix bugs. In fact, at the moment, I'm doing more enhancements to Cumulus 1 than Cumulus 2. Actually, recently, I'm spending very little time doing changes to either, as at the moment I can only spend about 2 hours a day on Cumulus, and all of that is taken up with support.

Thanks for your quick response!!

Yes I'm using an USB adapter, is this the reason?
So there's no way to have a single file for the log?
I read the webtags and it seems that pretty much everything is there except for the current weather of course.
In Cumulus 2 except exporting, will there be available those monthly logs too?

Sandro wrote:So there's no way to have a single file for the log?

No. You could concatenate the monthly log files to get a single file. The dayfile.txt is just a summary of each day's highs and lows etc.

In Cumulus 2 except exporting, will there be available those monthly logs too?

The current plan is that there will only be the SQLite database. Anything could change, of course, it's still in the very early stages.

I think I'm gonna stick with Cumulus 1 then since I really need text logs for an online automated archive.
I didn't try it but is it possible to upload automatically certain files at preferred intervals? is this what the section to choose files in FTP tab is about? Practically what I'd like to do is upload every X minutes WITH realtime.txt also monthYearlog.txt, in this way I could create a script that analyzes the last rain so I could show a "sky conditions" in real time along with the METAR, I think that's what WD does...except for the fog of which I can't think how to consider it.

... what I'd like to do is upload every X minutes WITH realtime.txt also monthYearlog.txt,..

Yup you can do that now.

Just give it the path / name you want. If you tick the realtime box it uploads at the same frequency as the realtime.txt file settings (ie. seconds), else it follows your 'ordinary' ftp settings minutes.

Don't forget however, that the name of the source file is going to change every month

great, yep that's in the downside of not having an unique log.

Anyway i was noticing right now with wind that Cumulus always shows and logs +0.1km/h than what I see in the display station.

I see 2,4 Km/h it shows 2,5, 3,9 to 4,0 and so on..ok except now it's exact 3.6 on both station and cumulus. is this a known "bug"?

The wind speed is stored by the station in m/s to a resolution of 0.1 m/s. So:

0.7 m/s = 2.52 km/h, rounds to 2.5 km/h
1.1 m/s = 3.96 km/h, rounds to 4.0 km/h

OK thanks, that's fine then.

I'm pretty sure I'm gonna have to buy a serial port PCI-E but I was wondering if anyone is NOT having problems with the usb adapter

Just wanted to report that it happens (like now) that when I close Cumulus for long times (this time 14h) so he has to download from the datalogger the windows that saying "downloading data-please wait" remains on screen forever even when it's finished. It's not a major problem Cumulus continues to work flawlessly and you just need to re-open it to escape the problem

Could you zip up the diags folder and attach it, please, so I can see what it's doing?

I will I can't remember when it happened, so next time

I disconnected the rain and wind sensor from the temp sensor for re-locating them all, I noticed that with only the temp sensor connected Cumulus reads max wind speed, ghost rain precipitations etc.. it could happen very rarely that the station doesn't receive the data and the wind will disappear, does it mean I will have this false values too?
I tried to delete the bad data and download the log, but those values come back, so I'm supposing this is a station problem that logs false data, not Cumulus'?

The data is held in various places in the station memory; Cumulus just reads those locations. There does seem to be a memory location which indicates that communication with the sensors has been lost; I suppose Cumulus could read that and ignore the data as necessary.

Ok, so you can fix this?

Do you know someone who had this problem?

about the last build, what exactly did you change about dayfile.txt?