Cumulus Support

Hi,
thank you for Cumulus! I really like it so far.
Just a problem I hope could be solved:
- I installed cumulus yesterday, it's connected through VirtualVP, all was working fine
- Shut down the pc during night
- This morning I opened Cumulus again and:
* graphics shows me only this morning readings
* feb10log.txt shows yesterday records until shutdown time and today records but not night records
* checked the problem with data format I red on a previous post, but all seems fine
* I'm simoultaneusly running weatherlink on the same pc and it recovered night data from datalink

Thank you.

Some people have had problems with VirtualVP when used with Cumulus, when downloading archive data (I know of one problem I've had personally, and another that a couple of users in NZ have had). Could you please zip up your diags folder and attach it?

Here is diags folder

According to the diags files, this morning was the first time you ran Cumulus:

25/02/10 10.37.07.890 . Looking for strings file: C:\Programmi\Cumulus\strings.ini
25/02/10 10.37.07.890 . Station type undefined!
25/02/10 10.37.07.890 . Short date format: 25/02/10
25/02/10 10.37.07.890 . Long date format: giovedì 25 febbraio 2010
25/02/10 10.37.07.937 . Loading all time records file C:\Programmi\Cumulus\data\alltime.rec
25/02/10 10.37.07.937 . No all time records file found
25/02/10 10.37.07.937 . Showing main form
25/02/10 10.37.07.953 . Looking for C:\Programmi\Cumulus\data\today.ini
25/02/10 10.37.07.968 . Today.ini does not exist
25/02/10 10.37.07.968 . Read today file: Date = 00/00/00, LastUpdateTime = 25/02/10 10.37.07

That's because I tried to uninstall and reinstall Cumulus and then modified StartDate to 24/02/10 but no luck.

The station type in configuration-station is VantagePro2

Thank you.

What date did you change in which file? The date that you need to alter is the TIMESTAMP in today.ini. Changing StartDate in cumulus.ini is not the right thing to do:

http://wiki.sandaysoft.com/a/FAQ#I.E2.8 ... er_station

Just changed TIMESTAMP in today.ini and records (and graphics) now are updated! Thank you!

But what if I shutdown Cumulus again for a few hours, do I need to change TIMESTAMP again?

Thank you again!

Stefano

SteFra wrote:But what if I shutdown Cumulus again for a few hours, do I need to change TIMESTAMP again?

No, you only need to do that if you want Cumulus to read data from the logger from the period before you first run it. After that, it remembers where it got to and downloads the missing data automatically when you start it up again.

Hi Steve,
it's not a big problem, just to let you know and maybe help to resolve a problem.
After my last post on 25/2 the PC had been on for more then 24h, then on friday evening I turned it off and this morning I started to use the new PC dedicated to the weather station:
- installed Virtual VP
- installed WeatherLink and copied the folder containing my data from the old PC
- installed Cumulus and copied the data folder from the old PC
- started Cumulus and I had to configure the station and the internet settings

WeatherLink recovered oll the data, but you can see from my webpage http://www.demetralab.it/meteo/trends.htm that I have only today data in Cumulus. Sorry the webpage doesn't look fine, but it's work in progress...
I attach the diags folder.
The new PC will be on 24h from now so it's not a big problem a couple of days data missing, but just to understand.
Thank you for your work.

Stefano

The download of the the logger entries from VirtualVP failed:

01/03/2010 10.28.58.421 . VP2: Downloading history from 26/02/2010 17.30.00
01/03/2010 10.28.58.421 . y=2010 m=2 d=26 h=17 m=30
01/03/2010 10.29.00.578 . VP2: DownloadData_V = -32701
01/03/2010 10.29.00.578 . VP2: GetNumberOfArchiveRecords_V = 0
01/03/2010 10.29.00.578 . VP2: No history records to process

This looks like the same problem that others are having with VirtualVP.

Steve, I have been doing a bit of research on that problem has it has happened to both of my Cumulus.

Here is how I have setup my test systems:
The problem was that whenever Cumulus was shut down, the port it used on Virtual VP would remained frozen/open and could not be used unless Virtual VP was also shut down.

It seems that the problem might have been solved with the latest releases of Cumulus ... I have not had any frozen port on Virtual VP.

I have exchanged a few e-mails with Steve Hatchett (SoftWx Developer) whom is trying to isolate the problem ... a problem that might be cause when accessing the 'VantagePro.dll' libraries...

I haven't seen any problems myself where the port got frozen. The particular problem I was discussing with Steve Hatchett was where VirtualVP was failing to read the EEPROM data from the VP when asked to do so by the Davis DLL. The DLL does that before trying to download the archive data. He said he might have a fix, but didn't reply to (or didn't receive) my last email a few weeks ago asking how he was getting on.

I haven't changed the code which closes the connection recently, and I haven't changed the version of the Davis DLL (although a new one is now available, so I may do that soon).

steve wrote:...where VirtualVP was failing to read the EEPROM data from the VP when asked to do so by the Davis DLL...

Steve I think what appear to be two problems might be one and the same.

My Cumulus could not and would not update its weather data through Virtual VP ... because somehow the communication between the two software had stopped.

Even looking at Virtual VP main screen would confirm that there had been no communication for a certain length of time.

It was only when I restarted Cumulus that I was advise (by Cumulus) that communication through the port could not be achieved - the same port Cumulus was using minutes/hours ago!

steve wrote:...He said he might have a fix, but didn't reply to (or didn't receive) my last email a few weeks ago asking how he was getting on...

I received a couple of replies from Steve Hatchett a few weeks ago, but nothing since.

steve wrote:...(although a new one is now available, so I may do that soon).

Indeed, version 2.42, dated February 29, 2010, might solve the problem...

gemini06720 wrote:Steve I think what appear to be two problems might be one and the same.

My Cumulus could not and would not update its weather data through Virtual VP ... because somehow the communication between the two software had stopped.

Even looking at Virtual VP main screen would confirm that there had been no communication for a certain length of time.

In the problems I have seen, and reported to Steve Hatchett, Cumulus is definitely talking to Virtual VP - the VVP logs confirm this. Cumulus tells the DLL to download the archive data, and the DLL tells VVP to read the EEPROM data. VVP is failing to read the EEPROM data from the station, and is returning an error code. This causes the DLL to return an error to Cumulus so the download of the archive data fails.

Indeed, version 2.42, dated February 29, 2010, might solve the problem...

I think it's going to require a fix in VVP (for the problems I have seen), which is what Steve Hatchett was working on.