Cumulus Support

Hi all, I'm a noob here so please bear with me, I've tried to find the answers to this stuff in the wiki, help file and in the forum but have had no such luck.

First, my setup is Running a Digitech XC-0348 and EasyWeather 6.1 (bundled), and am impoting the EasyWeather.dat file with Cumulus v1.8.8 build 881.

A few questions:

1) Should I have Cumulus calculate the 10-min wind average, wind chill and dew point or will my unit provide the same information (EasyWeather appears to have a wind chill and dew point value, and not sure what the difference between the "Wind" and "Gust" values on EasyWeather actually represent).

2) As I am importing data through the .dat file does the Cumulus Station Settings option to Use Data Logger become redundant?

3) Does the Realtime Silverlight Application feature work with my setup? All that seems to happen is I get the CumulusRealtime.html page just show a "Loading data..." message, and nothing else. Does it produce data from reading direct from units or can it do it through the EasyWeather.dat route?

4) What's the difference between wind speed <#wspeed> and gust <#wgust> tags, as in what data is it? And in my situation what does <#wlatest> "Latest wind speed reading from console" actually give? What does the "current" bit mean - the last bit of data from my device or something else?

5) I've occasionally had the EasyWeather.dat file stop updating, and I get the same data values continuously from the time it stopped. Why does this happen and is there any way to fix it without reinstalling EasyWeather completely again?

Appreciate any help.

I reckon it'd be useful having a wiki page about what limitations / differences importing data from EasyWeather does compared to other methods.

TIA.

SUBYDAZZ wrote:1) Should I have Cumulus calculate the 10-min wind average, wind chill and dew point or will my unit provide the same information

There's no point getting Cumulus to calculate a 10-minute average as there won't be enough data points to make this sensible. The other settings, you can try both and see which you prefer (Cumulus may use different formulae).

2) As I am importing data through the .dat file does the Cumulus Station Settings option to Use Data Logger become redundant?

Yes. All the easyweather.dat mode does is to repeatedly read the last line of the file and process it as new data.

3) Does the Realtime Silverlight Application feature work with my setup? All that seems to happen is I get the CumulusRealtime.html page just show a "Loading data..." message, and nothing else. Does it produce data from reading direct from units or can it do it through the EasyWeather.dat route?

It doesn't make any difference. If you turn on the error console in your browser, you may see what the problem is.

4) What's the difference between wind speed <#wspeed> and gust <#wgust> tags, as in what data is it? And in my situation what does <#wlatest> "Latest wind speed reading from console" actually give? What does the "current" bit mean - the last bit of data from my device or something else?

<#wgust> is "gust", <#wlatest> is "latest", and <#wspeed> is "average", in this FAQ: http://wiki.sandaysoft.com/index.php?ti ... tations.3F

I reckon it'd be useful having a wiki page about what limitations / differences importing data from EasyWeather does compared to other methods.

Basically, I'd rather people didn't use easyweather.dat, and I'd like to withdraw support for it. Cumulus 2 won't have it. It was really just a very simple stop-gap before I found the USB protocol for the station. The results from this method are quite poor.

Thanks Steve.

So is my Digitech XC0348 a fine-offset station or do you now have the USB protocol to extract data straight from the unit or not? I just notice that my unit is not mentioned in the supported lists.

If not, can I assume using the EasyWeather.dat method is the only way I'll be able to harvest data from it?

I also assume that Cumulus is only reading the last line of the .dat file every 10 minutes (or whatever I the EasyWeather Interval set to, or is it the Data log Interval? They should be the same interval right? Am I better off having these set to a lower timeframe?

Regards the Realtime feature, if Cumulus is only reading data every 10 minutes from the .dat file, how does that work when set to say 60 seconds realtime interval?

Your station uses the fine/offset protocol so use that instead. Shutdown Easyweather software before changing setting.

SUBYDAZZ wrote:So is my Digitech XC0348 a fine-offset station or do you now have the USB protocol to extract data straight from the unit or not? I just notice that my unit is not mentioned in the supported lists.

Yes; basically I think it's true to say that if a station uses Easyweather, it's a Fine Offset. There are large numbers of rebadgings of these; I should really start a thread and get people to post their "badges" to get a full list.

Hi Steve; mine doesn't have a trade name anywhere, on the Console it just says Model WH1080; I think the easiest way to recognise them is by their appearance, so a pic of the remote unit would probably suffice; most WH series appear to use the same sensors.

Mike.