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Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Posted: Sat 19 Jul 2008 3:11 am
by glen.day
I have noticed a little bug with the Cumulus application (ha-ha not me this time :P) when it comes to recording the rain stats from EasyWeather.

I only discovered this the other day as it rained of course - For Example:- Lets just say that we receive a total of 1mm of rain in the one day, EasyWeather records this figure (1mm) line by line every time the computer receives information from the weather station but it seems that the Cumulus application keeps adding these rain figures for each line in the EasyWeather.dat file.

Another Example:-
My weather station reports that there has been 0.6mm of rain but Cumulus (@1:10pm Saturday 19th) reports that we have received 14.1mm of rain.

Hopefully the next version will fix this.

Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Posted: Sat 19 Jul 2008 7:52 am
by steve
Whoops. I'll have a look at it.

Steve

Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Posted: Sat 19 Jul 2008 10:26 am
by steve
I've tried to reproduce this using the easyweather.dat file that I have, editing it to simulate rain falling, and it works fine for me. Could you send me your easyweather.dat file so I can see what it looks like? Maybe the rainfall bits of the file don't work in practise in quite the way I think they do!

Steve

Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Posted: Sun 20 Jul 2008 1:33 am
by glen.day
Very strange maybe it isn't a problem with Cumulus?

My weather station reads 0.6mm of rain but EasyWeather records 14.1mm but under this there is a Max field with 0.6mm - I have a feeling that I have miss read something on my weather station and maybe my weather station reads the continuous highest rain fall? So Cumulus figures are correct, sorry.

Why is it every time I find something I make myself look like a fool - lol, oh well.

I seems that EasyWeather has a mind of its own - can't wait to Cumulus 2 comes out!

Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Posted: Sun 20 Jul 2008 6:44 am
by steve
That's OK, Glen, I can still believe that there are some errors in Cumulus with the rainfall calculations because of the way it works it out - it only uses the 'total rain so far' figure and then has to work out how much of that fell today by storing the value at start of day. It's somewhat error-prone. Cumulus 2 will hopefully be much improved in this area.

Steve

Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Posted: Sun 20 Jul 2008 12:05 pm
by glen.day
I'm still scratching my head about this one! Looked into it little more and have noticed that possibly EasyWeather is recording incorrect rain figures? Looking at my Weather Station now it tells me that 17.1mm of rain has fallen within 24 hours (Which sounds correct by comparing my stats with other weather stations in the area) but figures in .dat file say that 43mm has fallen? Huh? What's happening?

I have now cleared the .dat file and starting again.

Still confused. :cry:

Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Posted: Sun 20 Jul 2008 6:08 pm
by steve
So - because the .dat file shows 43mm, Cumulus is also showing 43mm? Which field in the .dat file has 43 in it?

Steve

Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Posted: Sun 20 Jul 2008 9:57 pm
by glen.day
The 43mm was showing in the rain in the last 24 hours (there was no rain the day before), I know for a fact that my area only received around 18mm, its just EasyWeather decided to calculate 43mm? Quite a difference!

I have uninstalled and re-installed EasyWeather and cleared the .dat file and pretty much started again - I will wait again until it rains and let you know if the same thing happens again - well it might not be a problem that you can look at as it possibly could be a EasyWeather issue with the rain figures being read from the station.

So it seems that Cumulus is just doing its job and reading the .dat file but EasyWeather is over calculating the rain stats, hmmm.

Not getting too excited but after uninstalling EasyWeather and re-installing there has been 0.3mm of rain drop last night while I was asleep - looks good at the moment all figures seem to be reading correctly - I will check again when we have more rain.

Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Posted: Thu 24 Jul 2008 9:42 pm
by glen.day
Please refer to the below topic for more information about incorrect rain figures:-

https://cumulus.hosiene.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=29

Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Posted: Wed 13 Aug 2008 3:22 pm
by philcdav
Hi guys. my Easyweather software hit a rain glitch today.
It suddenly recorded 190 mm rain during a lovely sunny spell from 0800 - 1200 today.

It made a right mess of the stats haha

Its happened before so am not sure what the mechanism is but its certainly NOT rain!

Any ideas

Regards - Phil (G0DOR - qthr)

Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Posted: Sun 17 Aug 2008 11:50 am
by philcdav
Hi guys. been doing some more research on the rain gauge issues and came up with this

http://www.digitalham.co.uk/equipment/Watson_W8681.php

regards - Phil

Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Posted: Wed 20 Aug 2008 8:40 pm
by harrym1byt
The rainfall glitch is either in the EW software or its USB driver. If you delete the complete .dat file, or use Worpad to edit out just the lastest lines where the glitch occured and save it, then run EW again - it will download the same data again from the display, but in all likelyhood with no corruption in the rainfall data. Each text line in .dat file starts with the date and time it was downloaded from the display, so it is fairly easy to work with. Which tends to prove there is nothing much wrong with the hardware.

What I have found is that when there has been some corruption then the .dat file will store much many more lines of data than it usually does. My last 7 days went by without any corrupted rain data, but tonight it was corrupted. Todays corrupted data took up as much space as the past 7 days worth of data.

Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Posted: Wed 20 Aug 2008 11:31 pm
by GeniSim
Hi,

There is indeed something wrong in the communication protocol between the station and EasyWeather. This is why I am killing and restarting EasyWeather every 10 minutes (as the communication often stop completely) and erasing easyweather.dat file every day (as sometime the communication continue but corrupted data is transfer). The best for Culumus usage would be to keep almost no data in the the station and erase the very small easyweather.dat file every 10 minutes as well as recomputing the rain data is taking some time even with a "good" version of EasyWeather when the station is full of data. Yet, after doing that the easyweather.dat file is clean.

Marc

Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Posted: Sat 20 Sep 2008 7:05 am
by glen.day
Sorry still having rain problems with mine - I hope its not a problem with the station itself, I won't be happy if it is.

Glen