Animation Factor

[wd40]

I have enjoyed playing with the new gauge.

With my Fine Offset I have the Animation Factor set at 40. Is there a good sense limit on the setting?

I assume the demand on the CPU to make the animation of the pointer is not there when Cumulus is minimized to the tray. Is that correct?

Randy

[steve]

The animation does use a lot of CPU. It uses very little when minimised.

40 seems very slow to me, but it's up to you, really.

[SUBYDAZZ]

What does the value of the factor represent, update frequency? Is the default 2?

[daj]

The default is 2 -- not sure what the unit is. The smaller the number the faster. I like 20!

2 means you hardly see the needle move as it jumps straight from one to the other almost instantly

Basically is represents how quickly the pointer moves from one figure to another as the wind speed changes.

[wd40]

I like 20!

20 is what settled on as well.

I wonder if there could be an over shoot setting to let it go past the wind speed then come back like you see on internet speed test pages?

Randy

[steve]

not sure what the unit is.

Me neither...

2 means you hardly see the needle move as it jumps straight from one to the other almost instantly

True. The default is 2 because that's about as slow as it can be with a Davis station with its 2 to 3 second update interval.

[daj]

The default is 2 because that's about as slow as it can be with a Davis station with its 2 to 3 second update interval.

Ah, I am in the cheap seats with a 48 second update from the FineOffset brand

[Ned]

I've been using 10, but when Cumulus is stopped overnight, it takes an awful long time to download the logged data next morning as the speed pointer faithfully animates all the changes in wind speed. I have over 100 records stored every night and might have to reduce the animation (or turn it off before switch off), but am wondering if the animation can be suspended when a lot of data is being downloaded?

[steve]

it takes an awful long time to download the logged data next morning as the speed pointer faithfully animates all the changes in wind speed.

Hmm, that's interesting. I haven't found that to be the case - on my development machine, with my Fine Offset station, and quite a high animation factor, it doesn't seem to take significantly longer to process the logger data than it used to.

But it does make sense to turn off the animation during the logger download so I'll do that - it's easy enough to do. The only reason I don't stop the display in general updating during download (and I know some people find it entertaining anyway) is that there isn't really any easy way to do it.

[wd40]

I was left with the thought this morning that it did take a bit longer but I am talking seconds here for the download with or without the animation turned on so it didn't carry much weight with me.

Randy

[steve]

As an experiment, I've just started Cumulus up on my dev machine with animation turned on (factor 40) to download overnight logger entries. It downloaded 81 entries, and it took 8 seconds from the time it started updating the display. I turned animation off and used the backup to repeat; it took 6 seconds.

[nking]

That's quite a price to pay for animation. I always knew that keeping still saved time

[steve]

That's quite a price to pay for animation.

Yes, two whole seconds. Just think what I could have been doing with my time instead

[Ned]

On bootup this morning I set the watch going from the first appearance of the Cumulus screen until the data upload finished (105 records). 2 minutes 15 seconds.
OK, I think Avast does a virus memory scan at the same time, so that's probably taking it's toll on this old computer, but it's surely slower than it used to be.
I'll disable animation tonight and see how it goes tomorrow - if I remember

[steve]

I didn't mean my experiment to be demonstrating that turning off the animation was unnecessary (and I've already done the changes), just to confirm my suspicion that it wasn't significantly slower for me. My development PC isn't exactly state of the art, but I accept that many people will be running Cumulus on spare/old hardware - my weather PC has a Pentium 4 in it and a not very smart graphics card.