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Cumulus MX FAQ

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Cumulus MX FAQ

  • If you use non-English settings, comma decimals etc, you will experience problems on Linux/OS X with Mono version 3.2.8 (e.g. on Raspberry Pi). But see the item further down about incompatible Mono versions
  • If you want to use your Cumulus 1 data with MX, and you use decimal commas, you will need to edit the .ini files to change the decimal commas into periods/full stops. The other data files will be OK.
  • If you are trying to use your Cumulus.ini file from Cumulus 1, you will need to make sure it doesn't contain any non-ASCII characters
  • Cumulus MX doesn't change the fact that you can't run two programs at the same time with the same station, whatever those programs are, unless you have something in the middle handling the multiple connections (e.g. Virtual VP for Davis stations)
  • If a settings screen shows red contents (red text and red boxes), invalid data is present which must be corrected before the form can be sent. One or more items on the page will have an error message.
  • Cumulus MX doesn't create any image files
  • Cumulus MX on Windows requires .NET 4.5 and hence will not run on the obsolete Windows XP
  • The realtime interval on the internet settings screen is in milliseconds
  • There is currently no 'diary' and hence also no snow recording
  • The requirement to run as root/administrator may possibly be removed at some point
  • When you install a new version of Cumulus MX (i.e when upgrading from one version to another), be sure to copy all of the files from the release zip file into your MX installation, and force a refresh of the interface pages in your browser. You can optionally just copy the files that I name as having changed in the announcement, but the risk is that I might have missed a changed file from the list. No settings or data are overwritten by the update.
  • Some setting changes don't take effect until you restart Cumulus MX
  • Note that the change to date/time formats in webtags also applies to NOAA report file formats., if you carry over your old settings
  • The 'extra files' editor updates automatically when a field is changed. You can press 'enter' in a text field to get it to update, or move to another field
  • The remote filename for an 'extra file' must include the path (if required) as well as the file name, just as in Cumulus 1. It does not use the 'directory' setting automatically
  • If you are using your 'old' Cumulus.ini file, make sure your 'ftp site' section is [FTP site] with 'site' in lower case
  • Davis stations sometime supply 'error' values such as 255 for wind speed. Cumulus ignores these and may log some of them to the diags file, if you have debug logging turned on
  • Serial device names on Linux are not COM0 etc as in Windows. You need to specify something like /dev/ttyUSB0 - do a dmesg at a command line prompt and look for the actual device name from your adapter. If dmesg says your cp210x converter (as on Davis stations) is attached to ttyUSB0, for example, you need to put /dev/ttyUSB0 for the serial port name in MX. You can set the serial port name in the MX user interface, but if for some reason you want to do it by editing Cumulus.ini, note that the item in MX is called ComportName (which is a string, for the full device name, e.g. COM1 or /dev/ttyUSB0) rather than 'Port' which is just an integer. If you have not run MX yet, this item will not exist, so you will need to add it (in the [Station] section).
  • If you are having problems after upgrading to Windows 10, see this post - http://sandaysoft.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=14148
  • Mono 4.2 is known to not work with Cumulus MX with USB stations, for reasons currently unknown. Some other versions of Mono may have the same issue. 4.6.x and 4.8.x appear to have the same issue, for example, and also later versions of Mono. The main issue is an incompatibility with the USB library which MX uses. The best version to use is 3.2.8, which is the default version in many Linux distributions. If you have to use commas for decimal separators, 3.2.8 is not suitable, but 4.0.x is probably the best version for you.
  • Cumulus MX will not run on Windows IOT
  • The Dashboard, Now, and Gauges pages all get their data using web sockets (on port 8002). If they are not displaying data for you, you have some issue somewhere on your system preventing that from working - a firewall issue, or perhaps a browser issue. If you can't get web sockets working on your system, you could switch to using Ajax for the data. See the announcement for build 3032 for instructions.
  • If you want to use a twitter.txt file and include any characters not in the 7-bit ASCII set (e.g. degree symbols or accented characters) you need to save the file as UTF-8 (without 'BOM')
  • As with Cumulus 1, if you have extra web files configured, only tick 'process' for those files which have web tags in them, i.e. they need processing.
  • An "error [object Object]" in your browser when you try to change settings is usually caused by using a version of Mono which does not support comma decimals, but can also be caused by an invalid setting
  • Twitter have changed their authentication method, and Cumulus is now unable to perform the initial step of obtained the authentication tokens. The fix requires significant change to the code and I have no forecast for this
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