APRS "wxnow.txt" and "local" web servers

[bpsmicro]

Greetings. Just found Cumulus and installed today to try with my Vantage Pro 2. Very nice work, I'm quite impressed. But I do have a couple of *teensy* enhancement requests (or perhaps you already do these and I just need to know how).

1) I wrote an add-in for Davis' Weatherlink to generate the standard APRS WXNOW.TXT file which can me imported into UI-View and other APRS software packages used by hams. Unlike CWOP, this is intended for use with software that actually sends out WX beacons via radio.
It appears as though Cumulus doesn't (yet) have a WXNOW.TXT capability. Is this something you're thinking of? Unfortunately for me, this would be a mandatory feature. If you need help figuring out the format (it's a bit odd in some places), I'd be more than happy to assist. If you do C++, I can even send you source for the Weatherlink add-in for reference.

2) Right now, it appears as though you only support updating of the web pages via FTP. In fact, my web server is on my LAN, and I'd *really* prefer not to have to run an FTP service on it. Is there a way to have it merely update the various files directly, specifying a direct or UNC path? I can live with FTP for now, but it seems a tad redundant.

3) Weather Underground (aka Wunderground) has this "Rapid Fire" capability. I can't say I understand how it works exactly, but Weatherlink supports it. Is this something you'd consider supporting? Having said that, your recent "realtime" efforts could end up making Rapid Fire redundant for most of us, so I wouldn't lose sleep over it.

Again, well done. I can easily see this giving some of these commercial products a run for their money. If I were them, I'd be paying attention.

Brad.
VE3BSM

[steve]

Brad,

It appears as though Cumulus doesn't (yet) have a WXNOW.TXT capability. Is this something you're thinking of? Unfortunately for me, this would be a mandatory feature. If you need help figuring out the format (it's a bit odd in some places), I'd be more than happy to assist. If you do C++, I can even send you source for the Weatherlink add-in for reference.

If you can point me at the spec of the wxnow.txt file and what I need to do with it, I'll have a look at implementing it.

Right now, it appears as though you only support updating of the web pages via FTP. In fact, my web server is on my LAN, and I'd *really* prefer not to have to run an FTP service on it. Is there a way to have it merely update the various files directly, specifying a direct or UNC path? I can live with FTP for now, but it seems a tad redundant.

Half of what you need already exists. If you tick the 'auto update' box in the internet settings but don't specify any ftp details, Cumulus will generate the web pages but not attempt to ftp them. Then you would have to run some sort of batch job to copy them to where you wanted them, there's currently no way to get Cumulus to put them anywhere other than the default. Another Cumulus user does this as he actually runs Cumulus on his web server.

Weather Underground (aka Wunderground) has this "Rapid Fire" capability. I can't say I understand how it works exactly, but Weatherlink supports it. Is this something you'd consider supporting? Having said that, your recent "realtime" efforts could end up making Rapid Fire redundant for most of us, so I wouldn't lose sleep over it.

I was asked about this some time ago, and emailed someone at Weather Underground asking for the details of what I needed to do to support this, but I didn't get a reply (unless it went into the spam bucket). So I'm a bit stuck. To be fair to whoever it was, they were very helpful when I first contacted them about the Weather Underground protocols, so maybe they were a bit busy this time, or my email went into their spam bucket.

Steve

[bpsmicro]

I'll see if there's an actual web reference, but below I'll paste in the contents of UI-View's Help topic on it, with a couple of my notes tacked in where there was a bit of interpretation confusion.
You can also look at the two links for additional/detailed notes:
http://ha5ob.ham.hu/APRS101m.pdf (complete APRS spec)
http://web.usna.navy.mil/~bruninga/aprs/spec-bugs.txt
Note that most likely, you're already generating *most* of the beacon for use with CWOP. As far as I understand, it's mostly the same format.
If you want to use me for test builds, PM me on the board (my spam filter grabs most e-mail from the UK, I'm afraid, until I have a whitelist e-mail address). I work at home so it's easy for me to do some tests here.

I'll look at the web-file thing. UI-View (which is on the same machine as my WX station) has a built-in scheduler, so that might work nicely for now.

And you're right about Wunderground. A few times I had near-real-time e-mail conversations with folks there, and sometimes no response at all. Frankly, this is really the least of my concerns.

Just for laughs, I played with VirtualVP, which allows up to four programs to "share" the VP2 console data, but it totally didn't work properly for me (no fault of Cumulus though).

Below is the short-form WXNOW spec used by UI-View (note: this file uses imperial measurements only):
--------------------
Weather Data Format
Here, between the two lines of '*'s is the format of the file your wx software needs to create (the lines of '*'s are not part of the file).

***********************************************************
Jun 01 2003 08:07
272/000g006t069r010p030P020h61b10150
***********************************************************

272 - wind direction - 272 degrees
010 - wind speed - 10 mph

g015 - wind gust - 15 mph
t069 - temperature - 69 degrees F
r010 - rain in last hour in hundredths of an inch - 0.1 inches
p030 - rain in last 24 hours in hundredths of an inch - 0.3 inches
P020 - rain since midnight in hundredths of an inch - 0.2 inches
h61 - humidity 61% (00 = 100%)
b10153 - barometric pressure in tenths of a millibar - 1015.3 millibars

The first line is the time the file was created in local PC time. Please note that the day of the month, the hour and the minute must be padded to two digits with zeros if needed, so this would be wrong - Jun 1 2003 8:7.

The second line is the wx report, in the format used in APRS "complete weather reports".

Not all the values need to be sent, but you should at least include wind direction, windspeed, wind gust and temperature. If any of them are not available, then replace the value with three dots - "..."

If humidity and temperature are included, then a UI-View32 system receiving the beacon will also calculate and display dew point temperature. If temperature and wind speed are included, then a UI-View system receiving it will also calculate and display wind chill temperature.

[steve]

I am now generating wxnow.txt files. I wasn't sure how often to generate it so I'm doing it once a minute. I don't have easy access to 'rain in last 24 hours' so I'm encoding that as 'p...' for now. Here's a sample:

Oct 28 2008 10:34
296/034g044t037r002p...P002h89b10017

Any obvious problems with the format? The values seem OK.

[bpsmicro]

Yeah, last 24 hours was a pain. I ended up having to calculate it myself, but that's something that can be dealt with later. For now 3 dots is exactly right. There's only one teensy enhancement request for later, and that's to allow a "beacon comment" to be tacked on the end. Normally that's where the weather station type is added (supposedly there's a table of standard short forms). But that can be dealt with much later too.

As soon as the new release is posted I'll grab it and poke at it. Many thanks for this. It looks like the last thing I need to punt WeatherLink.

Brad.

[steve]

I've uploaded the beta version now with wxnow.txt support in it.

[bpsmicro]

Thanks. I'm now running 1.83 Build 488, but there's no wxnow.txt file being created anywhere. I assume it's tied into some other option I have disabled and/or misconfigured. Any tips on how to get that working?

Brad.

[steve]

No, there's no option. It should just create the file in the Cumulus installation directory once a minute. That's what mine's doing. Are you running Vista? What type of weather station are you using?

[bpsmicro]

The weather station is on XP, talking to a Vantage Pro 2. I'm logged into the machine as an Administrator, so I have full permissions.

I have the web stuff updating now (it seems that if I make changes in the Internet Settings dialog, I have to close & restart Cumulus to make it cooperate with the new settings.

I've just turned on Debug Log & FTP Logging for a while, and I'll post back if I see anything pertinent.

Brad.

[steve]

Is it creating the wxnow.txt file now? It's not dependent on the internet settings. As long as it has connected to a station and has read some data, it should be creating the file.

You shouldn't need to restart after changing the internet settings, either. Very odd.

[bpsmicro]

It's just magically started to appear. Not sure what I did. Most curious. I'll keep an eye on it.

[bpsmicro]

One more teensy request, can you add a trailing space at the end of the second line (the one with the actual data)? UI-View appends a beacon text blob at the end (station details, etc), but for some reason won't let me prepend it with a space in the app itself. Fortunately the outgoing beacon is still good, it's just a technical violation of the spec (which I blame UI-View for, but that's not going to be fixed, since the author died several years ago).

Other than that, I seem to be off to the races here.

[steve]

Yes, I can put a space on the end, no problem.

[Bob]

I've just upgraded and I am getting a wxnow file in Cumulus root.

Cheers

Bob

[keithatrochdale]

Update this am, fine, wxnow.txt file is there.