Cumulus readme.txt v.1.9.4 - PLEASE read all of this file! -------------------------------------------------------------- Cumulus is 'donationware' - if you're happy with it, please consider making a donation! Important: On Vista and Windows 7 (and the corresponding server operating systems), it is strongly recommended that you install Cumulus outside the Program Files hierarchy, e.g. put it in C:\Cumulus\. If you choose to ignore this advice, you may have trouble locating your data files (and any diagnostic files produced by Cumulus) as Windows will redirect them to a hidden folder. See the FAQ ("I can't find my data files") for more details. On some systems, depending on how they are configured, this may cause Cumulus to fail to run at all. You have been warned! Be careful with the clock on your PC. Try to keep it correct, and don't allow it to be adjusted automatically within an hour of the end of your meteorological day. Note that the default setting in Windows 7 (and possibly other versions of Windows also) is for the time to be synchronised at 0100 on a Sunday morning - this is likely to cause problems! There also appears to be a bug in Windows 7 with the date format. It is recommended that before you run Cumulus, you use the following circumvention: 1) Open Regional and Language Options 2) Under "Format" pick anything else. (eg: English (United States)). 3) Press "Apply" 4) Under "Format" pick your desired locale (eg: English (United Kingdom)). 5) Press OK. Recent versions of Cumulus attempt to work around this problem, but carrying out the procedure anyway is a good idea. The first time you run Cumulus, you'll see a screen asking you for a few bits of essential information. You can click on the 'help' button on that screen for guidance. If you are upgrading, note that the installer will overwrite the supplied web templates (in the 'web' folder). If you have customised them, take copies before completing the install. If you use VirtualVP, it is recommended that you edit the cumulus.ini file (created after you run Cumulus for the first time) and in the [Station] section, add a line: VP2SleepInterval = 1100 If you are using a Davis station and have problems getting Cumulus to connect to it, you need to make sure your serial port is set to 19200. Davis stations calculate Sea Level Pressure from Station Pressure using a formula based on several parameters such as temperature, humidity, etc, rather than just using altitude as most other stations do. CWOP require 'Altimeter Pressure' to be uploaded, i.e. a value calculated simply using altitude. The station does not provide this value directly, nor the station pressure, so Cumulus has to read some extra data once a minute in order to do the calculation. This can take several seconds, so it means that a 'normal' data reading may be missed, so you might miss a high gust value, for example. If you don't use CWOP, or you are happy for Cumulus to send Sea-Level pressure to CWOP (the difference is small unless you are at high altitude) add a line to the [Station] section of cumulus.ini: DavisCalcAltPress=0 Make sure you always have your station connected to your PC before starting Cumulus. It is strongly recommended that you set the archive interval in your station and the Cumulus logging interval to the same value. This is particularly important if you have a Davis station as otherwise you may activate the 'feature' in the Davis stations where they send the entire contents of the data logger when Cumulus asks for the data since it was last running. You will need to use the Davis Weatherlink software to set the station's logger interval, and note that chnaging the station's logger interval also deletes any existing data in the logger. Note that Cumulus won't be able to operate correctly if you set your station logger interval to more than hour (and an hour itself may cause problems). It is recommended that you use an interval of around 5 to 15 minutes to get the best use of your data. If you close Cumulus down each night, you should avoid closing it down just before midnight (if you use a midnight end of day), i.e. when the station will not make any more logger entries before midnight. This is likely to cause problems when Cumulus starts up again in the morning, as it will have no 'new' data to read before it has to do the rollover. In general, it's a good idea to avoid stopping or starting Cumulus close to the start/end of the day. Don't edit (or even open) any of the data files using Excel! Use a plain text editor or CSVed - or better still the 'Cumulus Toolbox' - see the web site downloads section. Excel is quite likely to change the date formats, and/or the field separators, and they have to be in a specific format - in particular the year has to be two digits rather than four. If you want to carry out analysis of your data files using Excel, do it on a copy of the data. Cumulus requires a minimum display size of 1024x768. It will work on smaller displays, and tries to cope, but the display will be less than perfect. High DPI settings (greater than 100%) may also cause problems (some text hidden or 'scrunched up'). Note that Cumulus does not read highs and lows from the station, it maintains its own. This is for several reasons; Cumulus supports an 0900-0900 meteorological day, it works with a number of differing station types, and it typically maintains more highs and lows than you station does. It is not practical for me to write and maintain separate code to handle some highs and lows differently, or there would be no Cumulus at all. What this all means is that you may see slight differences between the highs and lows reported by your station and by Cumulus. If high accuracy is important to you, you should be running Cumulus 24 hours a day anyway; but note that even if you do, there may still be slight differences in the highs and lows that your station reports due to clock differences and differences in calculation methods. If you are using the supplied web templates to create a web site, you will need to manually upload a few files and create an images directory on your web site. See the help file under "Creating a web site". Note, if you are upgrading from a previous version, that some of the supplied web files may have changed (the javascript files, in particular) so you should upload the files from this release once you have finished the installation. Cumulus doesn't attempt to download any data from loggers from prior to the point when you first install it. You can force it to do so, after you have run it the first time, by editing the timestamp in the today.ini file. You may need to do a little editing of your data files after doing this, as you may have duplicate or out-of-sequence entries. Note that this does not work for WMR200 stations: This station deletes logger entries when they are downloaded, and there is no mechanism for retrieving logger entries for a particular period; it just sends all the entries that it has. Any data in the station's logger will most likely be downloaded and discarded by the station the first time you run Cumulus - be warned! You may be able to circumvent this by creating a today.ini file in the data folder before you first run Cumulus, with just this in it: [General] Date=10/04/2012 Timestamp=10/04/2012 10:00:00 Change the dates and time to match the point from which you want Cumulus to start downloading data. If the station has already sent the data, this may not work, unfortunately. And I can't guarantee that you will have any success with this method anyway. Warning: If your weather station is a La Crosse and it is connected using a serial/USB adapter, then you will probably have problems using it with Cumulus, in that you will get erroneous data from time to time. These weather stations are known to have problems with some serial/USB adapters. There doesn't seem to be anything I can do about this. For this reason, I am sorry to say that I cannot support the use of Cumulus in this way. Even if you use a direct serial connection, I can only offer limited support as I don't actually own a La Crosse station. In particular, if you get bad data from time to time, I am afraid there is nothing I can do about this; La Crosse stations appear to suffer badly from RFI (radio frequency interference). Please read the help file! There is a wiki with lots of useful information at http://wiki.sandaysoft.com/ There is an FAQ at http://wiki.sandaysoft.com/index.php?title=FAQ Please note that the Vantage Pro/Pro2/Vue USB support appears not to work. You should use a virtual COM port with the Davis CP210X driver. If you've been using Weatherlink with your station with the USB setting, it will have set the station into "USB express" mode. Before you can use it with Cumulus, you need to first run Weatherlink and change to serial mode via the virtual COM port. See the FAQ for further details. You cannot normally run Cumulus at the same time as other weather station software (with the same weather station), unless you are using something like Virtual VP for a Davis station, or are making some other provision to specifically allow it. But note that Virtual VP and the Davis DLL which Cumulus uses to communicate with the station do not seem to get on with each other, some people experience problems; I did myself when I tried to use it. Don't allow your PC to hibernate/sleep/suspend while Cumulus is running - you will lose data! Don't disconnect your station while Cumulus is running; Cumulus only catches up with logger data when it starts up, it won't be able to catch up with the data that it missed while you station was unplugged unless you close Cumulus before you disconnect your station, and connect your station again before you start Cumulus up - i.e. your station must be connected to your PC all the time that Cumulus is running. Unplugging a station while Cumulus is running can cause high CPU usage in Cumulus, which continues even after you plug it back in again. If you change your system date or time format, or other regional settings such as the list separator, after you have been running Cumulus for some time, this will cause problems, as Cumulus will no longer be able to recognise its own data, and Windows will no longer be able to recognise and convert the dates and/or times for Cumulus. Similarly, don't edit the log files to add your own text or other information. During the install, you will be offered the choice of installing the HTML files. If you are upgrading and have modified the supplied web pages, you might want to untick this option, to avoid them being overwritten by the installer. The installer will in any case install the new pages to the 'originals' folder in the 'web' folder, so you can examine them to see if anything has changed that you might want to incorporate in your versions. Each time Cumulus starts up, it creates a backup of the current 'live' files, so that you can easily 'rewind' to the same point if you have a problem later. The backed up files go in a subfolder of the 'backup' folder in the Cumulus installation folder. The name of the folder is based on the date and time - yyyymmddhhmmss - so that you can easily find the appropriate one. It keeps the latest ten backups. You perform the rewind by stopping Cumulus and copying all of the files from the appropriate backup folder to the data folder. If you rewind to the previous month, you also need to delete the log file for the current month, or you will get duplicate entries in that file. Note that you cannot rewind if you have an Oregon Scientific station. From version 1.9.3, Cumulus also creates a 'backup' set after each daily 'roll over'. Do not create your own files or folders in the backup folder, as this will interfere with the backup mechanism. Indeed, you should not store your own files anywhere within the Cumulus installation folder or its subfolders! Cumulus assumes a certain level of weather station functionality. It checks that it has received data from a number of sensors (e.g. pressure and outside temperature) before it starts logging or uploading to the web. You can override this - see the FAQ. If you need to edit cumulus.ini for any reason, always do this with Cumulus stopped. ------------------------------------------------------------- Upgrading: If you are upgrading from a previous version, you can install this version over the top of these (just run the setup.exe). Your data files will be saved (you should take backups before upgrading to be safe). An upgrade doesn't change or lose any data or settings. You should of course check everything after the upgrade to make sure all is still as it was. Uninstalling: Only the files which were created by the installer are removed. ------------------------------------------------------------ I hope you find Cumulus useful. I am happy to receive bug reports, comments, and requests for new features, but please don't email me or use the contact form. I can't do 'personal' support. Please use the forum at http://sandaysoft.com/forum You might even want to make a small donation? See the 'Help : About' box in Cumulus. But please make sure that you have tried Cumulus for a while and you're happy with it, before donating. This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit. (http://www.openssl.org/) Copyright (c) 1998-2008 The OpenSSL Project. All rights reserved. Steve Loft October 2013