Cumulus Support

I have a Davis VP2 system, connected to my PC for reporting by an Envoy. For over a year I've been running Cumulus nearly all the time, using it to report to Wunderground and to create Cumulus-generated set of web pages.

As, I'm embarrassed to admit, I initially failed to spot the historical capabilities of the Cumulus select-a-graph function, I've had the habit from the beginning of stopping Cumulus and running Weatherlink for just long enough to load the data since last update, then revert to Cumulus.

The WeatherLink part of this seems to have started behaving abnormally a few weeks ago. Here is the current behavior, logged starting with a shutdown of Cumulus which has been running for a day.

1. on commanding download of the station, WeatherLink announces there are 369 pages (72%) available. At my data collection rate (5 minute interval) this would historically have been a bit under seven days--odd since I downloaded it yesterday, at which time it announced 6n% available.

2. the WL transfer progress bar appears to show normal progress to completion

3. On clicking WL's "make a plot" button after the transfer is complete, the page shown is for October 14, the same it has been since this problem started, and not today. clicking the date shows available days of data going back but not days more recent.

4. WL shows the "station" to have the correct current date and time.

5. on shutting down WL and restarting Cumulus, Cumulus shows the "please wait, downloading data" box for 68 seconds--far longer than the historic amount for a 5 minute shutdown.

Any guesses as to what is going on, suggestions for diagnosis, or suggestions for possible fix I would welcome. I explicitly don't consider Cumulus a prime suspect, but this is the forum where I seem most likely to have my plight meet wisdom or help.

I can't help with WL, but if you zip up the diags folder and attach it, I can see what Cumulus is doing.

Note that a longer than expected initial download in Cumulus is usually this: http://wiki.sandaysoft.com/a/FAQ#Cumulu ... t_start_up

I believe I have the logging and update intervals set to 5 minutes all around, and believe I did not change them when the behavior changed suddenly.

In composing this answer I shut down Cumulus, started WL, and checked Setup|Archive interval and found it to be at 5 minutes.

On restarting Cumulus I checked Configuration|Data Log interval and found it to be set to 5 minutes.

Any chance something violent, such as unplugging Envoy, removing the batteries, waiting an hour, then adding batteries and plugging it in, might be the right move?

It seems to be taking a long time (around a minute) for the response to come back to say that there aren't any logger entries available:

11/8/2012 17:24:12.374 : VP2: Downloading history from 11/8/2012 5:20:00 PM
11/8/2012 17:24:12.374 : y=2012 m=11 d=8 h=17 m=20
11/8/2012 17:25:01.362 : VP2: DownloadData_V = -1
11/8/2012 17:25:01.362 : VP2: GetNumberOfArchiveRecords_V = -1
11/8/2012 17:25:01.362 : VP2: No history records to process

and

11/9/2012 17:28:29.650 : VP2: Downloading history from 11/9/2012 5:20:00 PM
11/9/2012 17:28:29.650 : y=2012 m=11 d=9 h=17 m=20
11/9/2012 17:29:26.807 : VP2: DownloadData_V = -1
11/9/2012 17:29:26.807 : VP2: GetNumberOfArchiveRecords_V = -1
11/9/2012 17:29:26.807 : VP2: No history records to process

archae86 wrote:Any chance something violent, such as unplugging Envoy, removing the batteries, waiting an hour, then adding batteries and plugging it in, might be the right move?

I guess it has to be worth a try, I can't think of anything else to suggest.

As always, thanks for the assistance, Steve.

I started a topic on my problem over at Wxforum, including Steve's observation from the diags of the flavor of the Cumulus initial download delay.

Combining my own thoughts with additional advice provided there by dalecoy I think matters are recovered, with current normal behavior, intact Cumulus data, and nearly a one-month gap in Weatherlink history.

Details in case of interest, quoting from my last post at wxforum:

I am not sure which step clear which part of the problem, but in aggregate I did a cold PC reboot, an Envoy full disconnection with five minutes of disconnection and no onboard battery, deletion of the current and previous month Weatherlink history files, and a "clear archive".

I did the PC plus envoy cold reboots first. After that there was some change in behavior, and for the first time since October 14, I was offered a today plot option in Weatherlink. However, no data was displayed there.

So after that I deleted the 2012-10.wlk and 2012-11.wlk files, and cleared the archive (I assume this means Envoy onboard memory) in WL using Setup|Clear...|Archive Memory.

After running in Cumulus (my default mode) for an hour after these measures, I stopped Cumulus, started WL, downloaded, and found that I had one hour of fresh data. Stopping WL and restarting Cumulus the startup data download delay seemed normal.

Ah, yes, it didn't occur to me to suggest clearing the archive data; I seem to recall now that other problems in the past have been fixed that way, rather than needing a full reset.