Cumulus Support

Hi, I am a new Cumulus user – any help much appreciated!

I recently purchased and installed a Davis Vantage Pro2 Plus weather station and a “Meteo-pi” HAT (for Raspberry pi) from Prodata. I am connecting to the Davis console serial port with the Meteo-pi sitting on the GPIO pins of my Raspberry pi 4B, and have now installed Mono and the latest MX release (build 3089), all as per detailed instructions from Prodata and the MX Wiki.

Everything has gone well, except when I run MX I am not getting any live weather data on the gauge and chart screens.

I attach a zipped Diags logfile taken over about half an hour after turning debug and data logging on, and also the Cumulus.ini file used. Note the serial port name I entered in Cumulus setup (/dev/ttyS0) is the Raspbian name for the mini-port on the pi 4 (also configured via the pi Config.txt file in the boot directory). If I change the setup name in Cumulus to /dev/ttyS1 or /dev/Serial0 for example, then this throws out an error and the data/command LEDs on the Meteo-pi interface stop flashing. Set correctly as per above and the LEDs flash continuously (supposedly) indicating data transfer.

Log interval is set to 1 minute

The pi console reported the following:

Connected to station
Your console firmware version does not support LOOP2. Consider disabling it in Cumulus.ini
Cumulus running at: http://*:8998/
(Replace * with any IP address on this machine, or localhost)
Open the admin interface by entering this URL in a browser.
04/08/2020 11:38:46
Type Ctrl-C to terminate
Downloading Archive Data
Downloading Archive Data
Normal running

I’m not sure why I am getting the LOOP2 error as the firmware version in the Pro2 console is 3.83 (EU). Also I cannot locate any Loop2 parameters in the Cumulus.ini file.

If this turns out to be a hardware issue with either my Davis console or the Meteo-pi interface, then I will need to go back to Prodata for help. It looks to me like Cumulus is either not receiving data, or is receiving all nulls.

Apart from asking for help with the main issue above, I also have a question about these screens, which I have obviously assumed should show real time sensor data. There is nothing I can find that references the refresh time for the gauges etc. The Setup only has a “Log interval” which I guess is how often a snapshot is stored for later statistics and report processing (daily, monthly, etc.). I know the Pro 2 reads most of the sensors every 2.5s but how often does the Cumulus software refresh, and how can this be controlled?

You're right, there are no comms.

Your settings look OK - I use "/dev/ttyS0" and 19200 with my Meteo-pi HAT and it works ok.

You could check the console serial speed on the console - but it should be 19200 by default.

Other than ta=hat, it would be checking for bent pins, and making sure the cable isn't offset.

Are you using the data only cable, or data and power ribbon cable? Either way you could try the other cable.

Thanks for the quick response Mark.

Yes I don't think there is too much difference between my pi 4b and your pi 3B in terms of GPIO hopefully. Good idea re the cables, but regrettably it didn't make any difference. The results were exactly the same.

Interestingly I cannot check the baud rate on the Davis Console as it does not show up in Setup. The Setup mode only displays this if it "Detects a WeatherLink data logger installed..." and it doesn't seem to like my Meteo-pi serial interface with either cable! As you say it should hopefully default to 19,200 though.

There are no bent pins or other obvious issues so I will get in touch with Prodata.

Grateful for your help.

Colin

The console not detecting it has a logger attached is the problem. Something not right somewhere.
My Meteo-Pi hat is actually on a Zero! It's a bit slow, but it's good for testing, it highlighted some race conditions in MX that you don't see on faster multi-CPU machines.

Just an update regarding the conclusion of this issue, in case anyone experiences anything similar.

Following the help here, I also got good support from both John at Prodata and Wojtek from WiFiLogger. Essentially the Davis console was never recognising it had a logger installed, and would not display the baud rate in Setup. Wojtek suggested I remove the batteries and perform a console reboot after adding the logger. To be fair I had been warned to add the logger with both Pi and Console powered down.

I had foolishly interpreted this as being about not blowing up components, and although I had installed an unpowered logger in the Console with power supply removed, I did not remove the batteries. I had assumed running Setup would then cause it to see the device. It would rather seem however that the Davis Console software only looks for a logger after a hard reboot. There is no mention of any of this in the Console user manual, which says the console bleeps twice on booting. Wojtek explained that if it detects a logger, it beeps 3 times (actually it beeped once, followed by a delay, then twice more). I had also assumed that Davis intended you always keep batteries in the Console during such operations to protect Setup data. In fact I noticed no data loss with the batteries removed for a few minutes.

All's well that ends well! Now to figure out what I can customise. Apologies in advance for any more newbie queries.