Cumulus Support

Cumulus MX appears to support only a very limited range of Weather stations, some (like Oregon Scientific) are now obsolete. I used to have an Oregon Scientific one but several components failed and being unable to purchase replacements I bought a brand new Curconsa Station primarily because it covered all my needs in terms of sensors and also because it appeared to have a good high quality display which was easily readable (unlike the old Oregon Scientific one). However I now find that it isn't supported by Cumulus MX. Is there any way I can 'tweak' Cumulus MX to support this station or is there any hope that formal support will come along in the near future for the expanded range of stations that are now available? Thanks for your feedback.
Bernard

Hi Bernard,

I'm certainly no expert on the subject - but I did have a quick look at your station on amazon.

✔ Can the data from the weather station be saved and downloaded?

Yes, you can check the weather station data and download it on the weathercloud and weatherunderground websites.

One of the main reasons only certain stations are supported is that the data is locally available either by a gateway or server. This station does not seem to support this local function and you can only get your data from websites above. This does seem like a twisted question - as I'm not sure you can export CSV or other useful bulk data from these 3rd parties.

https://github.com/matthewwall/weewx-interceptor

The program above allows you to 'intercept' the network traffic from a weather station and use it in weewx. You are basically doing a man in the middle attack on your own station, just to get your data! I did very briefly use this with an older bresser unit - but my frustration finally won out and I just bought one that had the support I needed. From memory I think my bresser (on amazon was called a Youshiko ) is actually a clone which is why I was able to get this to work.

Cumulus support seems to have been much easier back in the day when you had a USB connection from your station to your computer and you could capture the data that way, with the advent of wireless and wifi stations this is more difficult - and with most companies wanting to go software as a service, it's not in their interest for you to have the data - especially for free.

After my experience with youshinko, I would never buy another station that did not give me direct access to my data.

Cumulus support seems to have been much easier back in the day when you had a USB connection from your station to your computer and you could capture the data that way, with the advent of wireless and wifi stations this is more difficult - and with most companies wanting to go software as a service, it's not in their interest for you to have the data - especially for free.

Would totally disagree with this. All the USB attached stations that were supported by Cumulus 1 are supported by CumulusMX if they are still sold and in addition you can now use Ecowitt USB attached and network attached weatherstations. Ambient weather stations using HTTP, plus people uploading to Wundeground or using the Ecowitt HTTP server can use CumulusMX and there is a new PWS Simulator.

Things are changing but CumulusMX supports many more stations than Cumulus 1

Thanks for your replies Guys.

I'm a long way from being a web coder, although I'm reasonably knowledgeable about Windows stuff and can usually slog my way through things. However I do struggle when there is no basic documentation other than the source code - that is something I've always struggled with over Cumulus MX. I've run Cumulus MX for a few years now in support of my old Oregon Scientific system, but in parallel with Cumulus 1 which, in my opinion, has a phenomenally better end user interface. However I accept the world has to move on, but a little documentation would help.

Prior to raising the initial post I had surmised that PWS might be a solution to my questions about support for other workstation types and I had gone through Config Wizard and entered it as the station type. Everything appeared OK in that there was no error message of any sort - the only problem was that the data produced was rubbish. I'll try and attach a screen shot below, but for instance MX says the outdoor temp is 30 degrees C, now even though its a warm January I'm in the UK and the workstation console is showing 4.6 degrees C, which I can assure you is more like reality. Pressure is showing on MX as 1017 hPa but the Console shows 988 hPa. The wind speeds are way out as well. Its as if the wrong data is being processed - a problem with data mapping?

So I'm left with a problem - either I'm being really thick and failing to work out how I should define my Curconsa device in MX via PWS (maybe there are other parameters I need to tailor?) or there's something wrong with the PWS simulator support, or maybe its just not going to work and I should give up trying because PWS simulator is not designed to do what I'm assuming it would do? I'd be really grateful for any additional help you can offer.
regards, Bernard

Hi,
Sorry I can't help on the simulator support, but is there anything logged in the MXdiags files that could be helpful?

Enjoy,
Paul

Hi Paul,

Thanks for your interest. I suspect there may be something odd being reported in the MXDiags folder in that todays log file has hundreds of "New all-time record" or "New monthly record" lines but nothing that includes the word "Error" so it may be commenting on errors but its not complaining about anything being wrong, if you see what I mean.

I'm not quite sure what function the PWS Simulator is designed to perform in that if it were designed to simulate or emulate any non-mentioned weather station it might well have to include some sort of data mapping process but I can't find anything that mentions this or even describes what the simulator is actually designed to do.

Any chance you can point me at somewhere that tells me what the simulator is supposed to do and how I'm supposed to use it?

Thanks for your response.
Bernard

It just simulates a PWS with dummy data so people can try out CMX in a stand-alone mode and explore how to set it up, what sort of features it has and how it all works. I'm not sure how a simulator could relate to reflect readings from your console.

OK thanks, at least I know what its supposed to do now.
regards, Bernard

water01 wrote: ↑Sun 08 Jan 2023 1:41 pm Things are changing but CumulusMX supports many more stations than Cumulus 1

I'm needing to replace an aging Oregon Scientific station very soon.

Is this list up-to-date? Looks to not have been edited for around 12months: https://www.cumuluswiki.org/a/Supported_Devices

It'd be handy to know which ones use USB, LAN or WiFi connection to retrieve data for use by Cumulus MX and which only download data from the web too.

The list at WxForum of Ecowitt stations https://www.wxforum.net/index.php?topic=40730.0 is up to date for them (most if not all are supported). The Wiki list is correct in terms of other weather stations, the only one that seems to be missing is Tempest.

The interfaces list would be very hard to maintain as some have multiple ways to interface them and others have just WiFi. Also MX contains an interface via a file (easyweather.dat) that some people have used and other methods of interfacing are appearing all the time (e.g. currently testing Ecowitt stations that allow access to their SD card).