Cumulus Support

I have been thinking about adding the Davis Airlink to my setup and that has made me wonder whether using Weatherlink Live with Cumulus MX may be worth it.

At the moment I am using Cumulus MX and a USB logger connected to my Davis VP2 connected full time to a raspberry pi, which works very reliably. But it seems quite interesting of the increased ability to assign sensors more flexibly than is currently possible when using console + USB logger. One thing that I have wanted I use with my VP2 is the solar sensor, which I hadn't been able to do because of the limitation that the solar sensor has to be connected to the ISS.

As it seems, unless I am missing something that except for the uploading to weatherlink and the viewing that data on weatherlink.com and their app that the functionally of WLL is pretty similar to my current setup using the USB logger in respect to Cumulus MX.

But for occasional power outages when I need the catch-up from the logger is the only way to get the logger functionality is to pay the Pro weatherlink subscription in order to retrieve the logger entries, rather than getting that data from the local device?

Is there anything else I haven't considered.

Thanks

You have summed it up pretty well. You *do* need a pro subscription if you want access to the historic data of the WLL.

Don't have Weatherlink Live on my station here, just an AirLink.

I'm very happy with the historic data the Cumulus has kept for me for the past 10 years.

But what I am wondering is if it's worth getting a Pro subscription for the next 12 months while CumulusMX (I'm Presuming), goes thru the process of expanding support of AirLink Sensors.

Am I to assume 2 things; that in the future CMX will handle more logging/graphing of Airlink data,
and when it progresses to that stage it will be able to retrieve the Weatherlink data that has been stored over that period?


Thanks

Phil.

Thanks Mark.

Are the archive records retrieved from the WLL itself or from weatherlink.com? I am asking that if the archive records are not from the WLL directly then when the power comes back on after a power outage I would think that I would need to add a delay to starting up Cumulus MX, to allow WLL extra time to upload the archive data to weatherlink.com.

@phil...
There will be more AirLink support in the next release, but it will be gradual ramp up of features.

Regarding accessing historic data. It works the same as any other station, in that it catches up since Cumulus last ran - there is no bulk download feature for historic data.

In theory you could save your data, reset Cumulus to catch-up a years worth of data, which would fail for your station, but would work for the AirLink. That would give you the historic AL data - save that. Restore your original data, then restore the saved AL data (it is kept in separate files).

WeatherLink.com records all your data whether or not you have a subscription. If you buy a subscription in a years time you immediately get access to all the data since you first connected the device to wl.com.

Matt.j5b wrote: ↑Mon 23 Nov 2020 11:17 pm Are the archive records retrieved from the WLL itself or from weatherlink.com? I am asking that if the archive records are not from the WLL directly then when the power comes back on after a power outage I would think that I would need to add a delay to starting up Cumulus MX, to allow WLL extra time to upload the archive data to weatherlink.com.

From wl.com - so yes it would be best to add a delay to start-up on reboot for the reason you state. Or do not enable auto-start.

Phil23 wrote: ↑Mon 23 Nov 2020 9:48 pm Am I to assume 2 things; that in the future CMX will handle more logging/graphing of Airlink data,

CMX logs pretty much all of the data that Airlink provides already.

CMX now shows PM2.5 and PM10 at one minute intervals on the graphs. Personally, if people want to do more with the data, they should upload to a database and then make their own graphs - much like the historic graphs that Mark wrote some years back.

I am inexperienced with php/javascript etc, but it wasn't hard to get CMX inserting Airlink values in to a database and then creating the extra graphs to show it.

I don't really know what more can be done? PM and AQI values are all available as webtags to do with whatever the user wants.

mcrossley wrote: ↑Mon 23 Nov 2020 11:22 pm

Matt.j5b wrote: ↑Mon 23 Nov 2020 11:17 pm Are the archive records retrieved from the WLL itself or from weatherlink.com? I am asking that if the archive records are not from the WLL directly then when the power comes back on after a power outage I would think that I would need to add a delay to starting up Cumulus MX, to allow WLL extra time to upload the archive data to weatherlink.com.

From wl.com - so yes it would be best to add a delay to start-up on reboot for the reason you state. Or do not enable auto-start.

I already have a delay of 45 seconds to give my network time to start up properly but I might need to add extra for WLL. I would probably need to experiment with that, but would the sending of the data to wl.com happen fairly quickly once the network connection is back up after a power outage.

I use a log interval of 5 minutes with Cumulus MX. If I want logged records in weatherlink.com to be at 5 minute intervals also then I presume that I would require a Pro subscription. My understand is the free subscription doesn't allow for a logged frequency of less than 15 minutes.

A free subscription does not allow you any access to historic data. You can view the current data on the web (the bulletin charts plot every 15 mins iirc) and that's it.
If you do buy a subscription then yes, make the logging intervals the same.

Thanks for clarifying that Mark.

Except for managing the situation around the occasional catch-up of the archive records in Cumulus MX, the WLL seems to be quite a reasonable substitute for the USB logger.

Though I am a little unsure how quickly the archive records get sent to wl.com after a power outage but as I said that is something I would need to probably experiment with. I suppose when that when the archive data is available for catch-up in Cumulus MX after a power outage would depend on how often the WLL retries a failed connection to wl.com.

The WLL uploads to WL.com once a minute, I don't know but I imagine it will keep trying once a minute until it succeeds.

Thanks Mark. I shall see what what happens in that situation.

Well, due to AWS issues, weatherlink.com was offline for uploads for over 12 hours yesterday, it came back in the early hours this morning. My WLL caught up fine on wl.com.

mcrossley wrote: ↑Thu 26 Nov 2020 1:25 pm Well, due to AWS issues, weatherlink.com was offline for uploads for over 12 hours yesterday, it came back in the early hours this morning. My WLL caught up fine on wl.com.

Do you have a subscription?

All my hi's/lows are wrong and so are the times.

For example, it shows today's high temperature at 01:08 of 9.2°C. It was 5°C here around that time.

Looking at my weather app, the missing data wasn't added.

I don't care too much as I don't store data with Davis via a subscription. However, I really regret buying a WLL. It's been nothing but trouble and various things within the app still don't work, and other things are incorrect.

Too late to send it back, so i'll probably list it on eBay when I get another £1 listing fees offer.

Yes, I do have a subscription. I decided to switch 100% from the VP2 console and wanted the catchup facility. Plus I needed it to test Cumulus MX functionality.