It just became a '.....great bit of software'.

I have just installed it a couple of minutes and I'm waiting for it to load all of the data.

Thanks Steve..

The latest version of this software - Cumulus 1.7.16 has been released today.
It's working well with my Watson W-8681.......... Tony Usher

Sadly a problem has arisen already. It seems that very occasionally the station loses contact with the outdoor sensors, and when this happens, the station sends invalid data for the outdoor sensors until contact is re-established. There is a status bit in the data to indicate that this has happened.

I should have a fix for this shortly, many apologies.

Steve

And mine too now...

The earlier 'direct' version didn't work with mine at least, in that it never updated the readings in Cumulus. I have been helping Steve over this last weekend, who's been working extremely hard to work out why it wouldn't work. It seems there might well be some variations in the methods used by the display base units to send the data via the USB - so basically not all of these models are the same.

I don't know if the version he has released includes the modification in the displayed pressure to include the programmed in the dispaly off set between abs and rel. Steve was using a calculation for off set based on the ASL figure.

Steve is now looking at Cumulus reading in the historical data stored in the displays own memory.

He also mentioned that someone was experiencing similar monsoon rainfall data with Cumulus taking its data in direct data from the display. Obviously I have only been able to use it in its direct mode for the past 24 hours, but has anyone else had any monsoon rainfall problems?

114mm in an hour in Liverpool today, apparently

But I think I understand the problem now and I'm pretty sure it's not the same problem as the Easyweather monsoon problem, so I think I can fix it quite easily.

Steve

Steve said that Cumulus was updating it's readings around every 15 seconds from the display unit. I suggested the readings appeared to perhaps actually change every 60 seconds or so in Cumulus's own display.

This compared to EW's own maximum update settings of 5 minutes between updates - probably to keep the size of the .dat file down to a more reasonable size. Just a thought - perhaps the (much) faster update could be retained in EW, but it could have discarded all but one data set in five to achieve the same file size?

My manual's back page suggests some of the data items in the LCD display base unit are updated every 48 seconds. Has anyone noticed/checked if this applies to all the data items? Does the frequency of update increase, if for instance the wind speed rises (as some WS do) or is it fixed at 48 seconds?

Data is indeed sent every 48". You can hear it on a scanner set to 868mhz fm. This time interval has always remained the same whenever I've listened to it.

Tony Usher

I believe Easyweather does 'discard' some readings between its logged entries. I can see this in my debug trace where each time I read the data, the 'current location' pointer stays the same for a few minutes, until the log interval is reached and it steps on to the next memory location, leaving the old location for Easyweather to pick up later for the easyweather.dat file. This ties in with the 48-second update interval and the 5-minute (or greater) log interval.

This is similar to what Cumulus does; some types of station update every 2 or 3 seconds; Cumulus processes the data each time but logs to file only every 10 minutes.

Steve

Version 1.7.15 didn't work at all for me neither on direct capture nor piggybacking EasyWeather. I thought this was maybe because I'm running Vista and tried run as admin but that disn't work either.

I've downloaded the latest version and that is showing promise but I've noticed one problem...

Immediately on statrtup as it establishes the USB connection it displays some pretty wild values. They get corrected but some evidence remains in the extremes table...



(Click for full size)

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I think that with Vista it's probably best to install somewhere other than the default (i.e. don't put it under Program Files). This is because it creates all its data files there and this is a bit naughty under Vista.

To help me track down the weird data data problem, could you please:

1. Stop Cumulus.
2. Edit Cumulus.ini, and insert a line in the [Station] section:

Logging=1

3. Start Cumulus, run for a couple of minutes, stop Cumulus.

4. Send me the debug.log file (to steve@sandaysoft.com)

Many thanks,
Steve

Edit: You're not running Easyweather at the same time, are you?