Cumulus Support

I have a WS-1081, working 24/7 since January when I bought it, and this weekend I encountered the dreaded "Loading data" lockup issue, after powering down my white box pc to install a bigger hard disk in it. Running Cumulus v1.9.2 on XP SP2. I noticed that the memory dial indicator on the console screen was showing as 100% full but as per the FAQ I did not ever try deleting data. Pulling the USB cable out and reinserting didn't work, nor powering down Cumulus or the pc - and EasyWeather software also was unable to contact the station (Cumulus log file shows the station was actually being found, but no data response received to the download request), so I finally had to pull a battery from the console to get it to reset. The memory dial indicator went to 0% (ie empty) so I sadly assumed all the latest data (since the lockup) had been lost, but when I reconnected it to the pc and then started Cumulus, then the downloading began and pulled heaps of data off the console and everything seems to be running fine, so I am assuming that there was still information in the console memory despite it saying there was nothing.

From all the symptoms being mentioned here (plus the note in the FAQs about these machines locking up) I would be fairly confident in saying there is a systemic fault in the w[h|s]-108x machines by the manufacturer - it is not a problem with the pc software being run.

I don't even know who the real manufacturer is, as mine came in a commercially produced box called "Solar Touchscreen", but it has the identical console screen unit to the other models being spoken about here and has the ws-1081 designation in small letters on the box.

regards

Cameron.

Your symptoms fit the 'USB lockup' problem. Versions of Cumulus from 1.9.3 have a 'synchronise Fine Offset reads' setting which tries to avoid the problem occurring (working on the theory that it happens when the console is writing data at the same time that software is reading it) which a number of people have found helps.

I have noticed that on some stations, a full reset doesn't clear the data in the memory (I assume they use a different type of memory) but I'd be surprised if it didn't reset the memory pointer, and hence I would expect that while Cumulus was able to download data, it would not actually be the correct data for the required period (the entries are not timestamped so the only way to work out when they were logged is to start at the current location and work backwards from the current date and time).

The manufacturer is called "Fine Offset Electronics Co. Ltd", and they are based in Shenzhen, China: http://www.foshk.com/. Their stations are available with a huge number of different brand names on them.