Cumulus Support

Hi everyone let me start with a quick background. I'm from the states and currently live in TN. I tried a quick search and couldn't quickly/neatly find the stuff I'm looking for. Anyways back to me. I have taken some met classes back in college so I have a fairly good understanding of how weather works. I am away from home a lot due to my job so one of the main things I like about this is using Cumulus to give wunderground.com my info. Since no one but me (probably at least) cares about the weather at my house I'm pretty happy with the readings and accuracy that I've been getting, but there are a few things that have me baffled and I wonder if it could be fixed.

1. The Cumulus forecast doesn't seem to change. Always says "stormy exceptional precip" or something like that. I spend more times in hotels than home so I can't remember the exact wording. I have my units set up in In hg since I'm in the states and a pilot the IN HG makes since to me since I know what normal is. I actually think I might have found the answer to this. I didn't change the figures in the bottom right of the set up screen because I figured they prob didn't matter too much since I figured the program would just look at the pressure trend for the forecast. However from another post it seems like I will have to convert those to IN HG and it seems like 28.00 to 31.00 should be pretty good since those are pretty extreme readings.

2. For some reason I really like getting on wunderground and see what has been going on my house. When the computer suspends/hibernates what ever you call it the data stops updating and the graphs will flatline. I figure there really is no way around this except for making my computer never hibernate, but that really isn't worth it if thats the only option.

3. This problem is related to the above problem. When I check the console history the low will usually be lower than the low temp that cumulus finds. I have the console set up to record every 30 mins. The low temp in cumulus seems to correspond with the low temp at the time the computer goes into hibernation, which of course is warmer than the real low since the computer goes into hibernation in the middle of the night before the low occurs. Is there any way to get cumulus to download the data from the console that was recorded while the computer was hibernating?

side notes to above...I have "close on suspend" un-checked and have "confirm on closing/shutdown" checked. I usually keep cumulus minimized and have those options selected in that manner so that the wife won't accidentally close cumulus and prevent me from seeing whats going on over the internet.

Thanks for your help and sorry if it was confusing, but I had a long day at work and somehow stumbled upon this forum and spent way too much time reading it tonite.

My quick answers:

1. Sorry don't know, mine changes. It isn't always accurate but it changes.

2. I leave my laptop permanently on and just turn the screen off after 10 minutes. This is also done for TiVo so its not such a waste.

3. as per 2. Mine seems to download values after the PC has been turned off, but not anywhere as granular as when the PC is on. Hence now the PC is always on.

side note, there is a lot of discussion on here about running Cumulus as a service. I now do this using svrany, but if I make any changes I stop the service and start it normally as interacting with the service has done a couple of strange things. This is not supported by Steve so do so at your own risk, but so far so good for me.

Great Cornholio wrote:Thanks for your help and sorry if it was confusing

You seem to have pretty much answered your own questions!

Cumulus can't cope with being suspended - http://wiki.sandaysoft.com/index.php?ti ... t-lined.27

You shouldn't need to change the forecast pressure extremes to "in Hg", it's designed to work with either mb or "in Hg" regardless of what pressure unit you're using in Cumulus itself. As long as the figures supplied match the units supplied, of course. But if you're getting the 'exceptional' message, it does suggest something's wrong somewhere. Presumably you've set the relative pressure on the station correctly?

Thanks for getting back so soon. The pressure seems to be set right it has been high but highs have been in the area. My pressure is usually within .02 in hg of what other stations in the area are reporting so I doubt it can get much closer since that is pretty close. I saw on here were someone else had a stuck forecast and it seems like changing those values worked for him.

The only thing I really would like is the ability for cumulus to download the data when it wakes up from being suspended so my low temp will be closer to the actual low. Oh yeah just saw cumulus 2 looks great. Hope it's out soon. Thanks for putting in the time so we can have a nice app for our stations

Great Cornholio wrote:The only thing I really would like is the ability for cumulus to download the data when it wakes up from being suspended

I did have a go at that, some time ago, but the station didn't seem to want to co-operate, and things got in a bit of a mess.

Oh yeah just saw cumulus 2 looks great. Hope it's out soon.

Well, probably not "soon", but "eventually".

I figured you had probably already tried to figure out a way to get that to happen. Thanks again for taking the time to listen to me.

steve wrote:

Great Cornholio wrote:The only thing I really would like is the ability for cumulus to download the data when it wakes up from being suspended

I did have a go at that, some time ago, but the station didn't seem to want to co-operate, and things got in a bit of a mess.

Is that just a Fine Offset thing, or applies to all weather stations?

qrqeather wrote:Is that just a Fine Offset thing, or applies to all weather stations?

The bit about the station not co-operating and things getting in a mess was just for Fine Offset stations, because that was the only one I tried, but the statement about not coping with being suspended applies to all stations, because I haven't tried writing the code for those.

I finally made it home and got to look at my station. The "bubble" was switched over to in hg but the numbers beside it were still set up for mb. It showed numbers around 1000 so my guess is that since most of my numbers are in the 30's the forecast thought we had horrible wx due to the pressure being so "low" Switched the numbers to 28.00-31.00 and the forecast is working fine now.

Hi GH.

if you really want to run the PC and Cumulus from a remote locale why not set up the PC for a phone line activation or self start to a timed schedule?

You could ..

1. set up the BIOS to turn the PC on when a land-line call is made (wake on Lan)
2. have Cumulus set up in the START menu
3. leave the system to collect the data
4. shut down.

I havent tried this but have been playing with Remote operation via a 'virtual network'. I use a freebie called 'RealVNC' to run my radio station from a nonhome location over the internet. I can take over the home PC operation, seeing the screen on my laptop and run any programs therin. It really works a treat.

Hope this helps

Thanks for the tip but that just seems a little too much for me...although it probably would be kind of fun to mess with the wife while she was on the computer haha. I have cumulus set up to transmit over wunderground and I just get on to wunderground to see whats going on at the house. What I did was just went ahead and made the time until hibernate longer. That solution has worked good enough for me....of course it seems like it hiberates right around the time that fun wx is happening at the house but thats just good ole Murphy's law.