Cumulus Support

Just wating for my weather station "Fine Offset WH1081" I ordered from Maplin's to
turn up, but have already starting thinking of how I will set it up etc..

I currently have a home server running Windows 2000, which I have
my photography website and Shoutcast online radio running from.

I would like very much to be able to run a Cumulus weather webpage
from my server to, but when I had a read up on the "wiki cumulus FAQ
states that:
"You will probably not be able to get it to work on Windows 2000 with a Fine Offset station."

Has anyone managed to get it to run on Window 2000? and if so would you be
able to explain how to do it.

If not is there any other way I could try?

It seems to work for a few people. I think one way that people have used is to run Easyweather first, and then start Cumulus. No guarantees, though.

I'm guessing a bit but I think the problem with Win2k is the USB. One of the things XP got working properly was the USB port. Win98SE and earlier used special drivers for USB. I went straight from that to XP. A friend had ME - what a disaster. She upgraded to XP.

Gina wrote:I'm guessing a bit but I think the problem with Win2k is the USB.

Yes, you're right. For some reason, the data comes out garbled or in the wrong order when Cumulus tries to read it on Win2k.

Thanks to you all for your replies.

I've just got my weather station delivered to my
work a couple of minutes ago, so now am itching
to get home and have a play with it.

With regards to getting it to work on Win 2k, I may just give it a go
and see if it works, if not I may have to take David up on his generous
offer for free! webhosting for cumulus users. As this post talks about:
https://cumulus.hosiene.co.uk/viewtopic.p ... 5&start=10

I will post up how I get on with trying to get it to run under Win 2k.

I probably wont be able to get it fully tested untill the weekend as I want
to get a longer mast and mast bracket from homebase, to mount it all
of my shed. Just hope the neighbours dont kick a football over and knock it down!

Just thought, would it be possible to use a Serial to USB Converter
instead of a connecting the USB cable to the pc using the serial connector
instead, to possibly get it to work?

Somthing similar to this, but with a longer cable.


As I dont have the base station to hand, I am not sure if the base station
has a USB connector on it that would fit the standard size USB plug, as shown
in the above image.

Those devices are usually for connecting serial devices to USB ports, rather than the other way around. But in any case, Cumulus can only drive Fine Offset stations via USB.

Steve, thanks for the info.

A quick update.

I have installed my weather station and got it working ok
with Easy Weather.

But as people have suggested when trying to run cumulus under
Win 2k it wont run. All I get is a Dialog Box saying Downloading data,
please wait. And it just sits there doing nothing

Just for my information does anyone know why Easyweather
connected to Win 2K via a USB works, but Cumulus does not?

As I would have though that if there was a problem with transferring
data via USB, then Easyweather would have problems too, which it
does not, as it works fine.

Solorize wrote:Just for my information does anyone know why Easyweather
connected to Win 2K via a USB works, but Cumulus does not?

The author of Easyweather might know, and Fine Offset might know, but they don't give away their secrets to someone like me. I have to do the best I can with information obtained without the help of the manufacturer.

Clearly it's not a simple incompatibility between the station and Windows 2000; it's something to do with the way that USB works on Windows 2000 compared to more recent versions of Windows.

Steve,

That's a shame that the manufacturer doesn't help.

I am stuck with Win 2K on my servertherefore I wont be able
to use Cumulus on it, which is a shame as it is a great
bit of software.

All I can do is hope that sometime in the future that the
manufacturer releases the information on how to get the data.

Or I wait for my server to crash and the have to re-build it
as an XP box.

You would think they would be happy to help; I can't claim to be responsible for thousands of sales, but it can't hurt to have other software available for their stations. I still dream that one day they will get in touch with me and offer me a contract developing Cumulus for them

That is very true.

Have you tried to approach them directly?
As you never know they may well be happy to do that.

Especially as Cumulus is a very well crafted bit of software.
With a good user base.