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Today.ini: Difference between revisions
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(→Introduction: Rewrite to cover MX as well as Cumulus 1) |
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== Introduction ==
The files '''today.ini''' and '''yesterday.ini''' are used by Cumulus to store some counts, plus the Highs and Lows (and their timestamps) for key parameters as reached on each of the two days, for Cumulus 1 these are source for figures that appear on the main screen, for Cumulus 2 and 3(MX) they appear on the dashboard you can view. These files are normally located in the "Data" sub-folder of the path where your Cumulus.exe is installed. See [[FAQ#I_can.E2.80.99t_find_my_data_files.21| FAQ on location of data log files]] for where else to look.
=== Sections in today.ini ===
The today.ini contains a number of sections. The [General] section stores current date and time. The [Wind} section stores the highest wind speed and highest gust, it holds the sum of wind speeds as wind run, and details for the dominant wind. The [Temp], or temperature, section stores the highest and lowest temperature, the sum of all temperatures from every minute (Total), and the number of Samples in that total, the Cumulative Chill Hours in the season, and the cumulative Heating and Cooling Degree Days for the current day. The [Pressure], [Humidity], [AppTemp], or apparent temperature, and [Dewpoint] sections just hold Highs and Lows. The [WindChill] section only holds lowest, the [HeatIndex] section only has highest, while the [Rain] section holds a lot of different parameters, including the Start count that derives most rain outputs, and the LastTip date-time.
Other sections always present are [ET], [Solar], and [FineOffset] whether these are updated depends on whether your weather station supplies the necessary information. All today.ini also have [NOAA] which will only be populated if you have set up NOAA reports, if you have it shows the file names of the latest monthly and yearly reports.
The highs and lows, as held in memory while Cumulus is running, are constantly re-written to ''today.ini''. At the end of a day [either midnight, or 9am (or 10am) depending on your configuration and season], the final values and timestamps written to today.ini file are rolled-over. Many are written as a new line appended onto [[dayfile.txt]] and most become values and timestamps in yesterday.ini; then a new today.ini is created. The three files have a few differences in content, so rolling-over does involve a little editing work. When Cumulus is left running, a daily backup of all the files is created as part of this rollover.▼
=== Differences between Cumulus 1 and Cumulus MX ===
All the sections listed above are found in both versions of the software, and for all except [FineOffset] the contents are identically formatted. For the exception, Cumulus 1 uses real values with 5 digits before the decimal place and several after to represent time as fractional Days Since 30 Dec 1899; while Cumulus MX shows time in ISO 8601 format of "yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss" (using the net specifiers that MX uses). MX adds an additional section [Records] that contains entries like "Alltime=2020-03-06T06:42:13", in that case it indicates that various all-time records (lowest temperature, lowest apparent temperature, and greatest wind chill, in this example) were set on 6 March, but none have been broken since.
=== When Cumulus is running ===
▲The highs and lows, as held in memory while Cumulus is running, are constantly re-written to ''today.ini''. At the end of a day [either midnight, or 9am (or 10am) depending on your configuration and season], the final values and timestamps written to today.ini file are rolled-over. Many are written as a new line appended onto [[dayfile.txt]] and most become values and timestamps in yesterday.ini; then a new today.ini is created. The three files have a few differences in content, so rolling-over does involve a little editing work, for example the 'Total' and 'Samples' values in today.ini become the single 'AvgTemp' in yesterday.ini and dayfile.txt; another example is the multiple lines in the [General] section of today.ini shrink to just one item in yesterday.ini (Date) and one item in dayfile.txt (abbreviated date). When Cumulus is left running, a daily backup of all the files is created as part of this rollover in a subfolder 'daily' of the backup folder. Equally, if you close Cumulus during the day it will write the final values for highs and lows and their timestamps to today.ini as part of the close down process.
=== Restart and Catch-up ===
If you restart Cumulus during the day it will read the ''today.ini'' file at startup, so it can resume tracking extremes of the key parameters starting from latest stored values in today.ini. On restart it also writes a backup of today.ini (and some of the other log files) into the sub folder 'backup' below the folder with the cumulus.exe. Because Cumulus software does it changes first in an internally stored area before writing out to today.ini, if you try to edit today.ini while Cumulus is running, you may find your edit is lost next time Cumulus itself outputs an updated file, even if your edit is not lost, you may lose a Cumulus edit by saving your own edited version to overwrite the Cumulus edit. So never edit without stopping Cumulus first. (yesterday.ini is created at rollover and then not updated, so that file can be edited while Cumulus is running provided you are several minutes away from rollover time).
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== Dealing with rogue values ==
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