Cumulus Support

I have recently purchased a new WMR88 weather station..

After initial problems with very unstable barometric pressure readings, [ no response yet from Oregon Scientific to my initial query as to possible cause ] I found it was caused by a faulty mains adaptor. It now seems to be working ok with only one period of loss of data from the wind sensor .

My question is that the Cumulus screen shows battery status bars for the various outdoor sensors. All are blue [UV sensor not fitted] whereas a photo in the Weeley Weather blog shows green. I assume blue is inactive.

The Virtual Weather program's "Sensor Communication Status" window icons for the sensors show all green including battery voltage.

What might be the reason for Cumulus showing blue battery bars. Not a big problem as the WMR88 main unit screen will show low battery alarms.

Using Cumulus Version 1.9.2 build 1032 on a dedicated PC under Win XP Pro SP3

John

Cumulus doesn't choose the colour, I suspect it's determined by the version of Windows and the theme in use. The indicator for the WMR88 is either off or on, and sensors which aren't present give an 'on' indication (basically, a flag is set when a battery is bad).

Thanks Steve for your very speedy answer.

John

steve wrote:Cumulus doesn't choose the colour, I suspect it's determined by the version of Windows and the theme in use. The indicator for the WMR88 is either off or on, and sensors which aren't present give an 'on' indication (basically, a flag is set when a battery is bad).

Hi everyone.

Sorry to bring this one up again.

I have an WMR88 and Cumulus 1.9.4 build 1097 on Windows XP SP3.

On the main display screen there are green bars for rain, wind, temperature and UV sensor battery (which I assume are supposed to be the battery levels). They are all green even when the sensor battery is low or flat, or the sensor is missing (UV).

It's unfortunate that a missing sensor shows the same as a good sensor, but I guess that's a limitation of the WMR88 protocol.

So my questions are:
1. What do the green battery level indicators mean, if anything, when using an WMR88?
2. Do they change from Green to anything else, and what triggers that change?
3. How does Cumulus notify a missing WMR88 sensor (particularly a good sensor that disappears)? If it doesn't, can this be added to the enhancement list? (I'm thinking that maybe a 'heartbeat' check of the data read from the station could indicate a lost sensor, and trigger an email or other alert?)

Thanks!

Cheers
…Steve

VidarParry wrote: 1. What do the green battery level indicators mean, if anything, when using an WMR88?

They are either 'on' (i.e 'full') or 'off' (i.e. empty), where 'on' means that either the battery is OK or the sensor is not present.

2. Do they change from Green to anything else, and what triggers that change?

Their appearance depends on the version of Windows and the theme you are using. They are effectively Windows progress bars, set to 100% for a good (or missing) battery and 0% for a bad battery. They are progress bars because I reused the same components that I used for other stations which have a scale for battery condition rather than just good or bad.The information comes from a 'status' flag in the data packet from each sensor which indicates whether the battery in that sensor is good or bad. Cumulus sets the value of all of them to 100% by default, which is why sensors which have not reported yet show a 'good' status (they are considered good until proven otherwise). If a station goes offline the status will be left at whatever it was when the last packet was received.

If your indicators look the same even when a battery is low, then either
1. Your progress bar looks the same when full or empty (unlikely)
2. The station isn't actually reporting battery low in the data packets
3. The unofficial reverse-engineered protocol spec that I used is not correct in this area. If you turn on the debug log, the data packets will be logged to the debug.log file, and this may give some clues as to what's going on.

3. How does Cumulus notify a missing WMR88 sensor (particularly a good sensor that disappears)? If it doesn't, can this be added to the enhancement list? (I'm thinking that maybe a 'heartbeat' check of the data read from the station could indicate a lost sensor, and trigger an email or other alert?)

It doesn't, because it gets no positive indication that a sensor has gone offline. If you would like to create an enhancement request for a 'lost sensor' mechanism for these stations (assuming there isn't a request already), it's certainly something I can look at in the future.

One thing I could quite easily do in the short term is to make the individual bars invisible until a packet has been received from that sensor.

VidarParry wrote:One thing I could quite easily do in the short term is to make the individual bars invisible until a packet has been received from that sensor.

Thanks for the lightning speed response, Steve

And that solution I think is a great method. Can that be enhanced a bit to say "If I haven't had any data packets in X minutes, flag as offline"? - do you want me to raise an enhancement request?

Cheers
...Steve

VidarParry wrote:Can that be enhanced a bit to say "If I haven't had any data packets in X minutes, flag as offline"? - do you want me to raise an enhancement request?

I can consider doing that in the future, but I am only doing bug fixes and very small enhancements at the moment, while I work on the new version of Cumulus. If you would like to raise an enhancement request, then it can't get forgotten.

Thanks Steve.
I've added it to the existing ticket #80 ( https://cumulus.hosiene.co.uk/tracker.php?p=1&t=80)
Cheers
...Steve