La Crosse 2810 Support

[mstealth22]

I couldn't pass up a La Crosse 2810 from Costco for $80. It is all setup and works good, thought I'm less than impressed with the HeavyWeather (I guess there is even a particularly HW version for this model) software. It seems to run and do the core tasks but that is it.

In my research I ran across this software and am impressed, nicely done. Has anyone gotten it to work with the 2810, either directly or indirectly with some workaround? My search yielded one post that mentioned the 2810 with regard to a bug in rain over 24hours vs rain over week,month,total, and nothing else.

I'm happy to experiment, test(I work with software testers everyday so it is not a foreign concept), and will gladly donate if there is a way to make this work.

Thanks in advance.

[steve]

As I understand it, the 2810 has a 'real' USB port, rather than a serial port? If that's the case it definitely won't work with Cumulus (because I would have had to put in the USB interface code).

[mstealth22]

You're right it is not serial, it definitely has a wireless USB dongle. What about parsing the heavy weather history.dat file?

http://www.lacrossetechnology.com/2810/

[steve]

What about parsing the heavy weather history.dat file?

Maybe one day. I did the same sort of thing initially for the Fine Offset stations.

[mstealth22]

Just for reference, after some digging I found that the Heavy Weather Interface software updated a file called currdat.lst

The format isn't too terrible. From my investigations it seems many of the La Crosse Stations dump to this file with a similar format.

Here is the file.

Code: Select all

[header]
programm_name=HeavyWeather PRO WS 2800
programm_version=1.0
file_format_version=1.0

[time]
last_actualisation="3468439138"

[weather_picture]
comment=-1=not valid, 0=rain, 1=cloud, 2=sun
number=2

[weather_tendency]
comment1=-1=not valid, 0=no change of air pressure
comment2=1=air pressure rising,  2=air pressure falling
number=1

[storm_alarm]
comment=-1=not valid, 0=storm alarm not active, 1=storm alarm active
number=-1

[indoor_temperature]
deg_C="20.1"
deg_F="68.2"

[outdoor_temperature]
deg_C="9.2"
deg_F="48.6"

[indoor_humidity]
percent="54"

[outdoor_humidity]
percent="83"

[dewpoint]
deg_C="6.4"
deg_F="43.7"

[windchill]
deg_C="9.2"
deg_F="48.6"

[wind_speed]
mps="0.5"
kmh="1.8"
mph="1.1"
knt="1.0"
bft="0"

[wind_direction]
deg="135"
name="SE"

[rain_total]
mm="133.1"
inch="5.24"

[rain_24h]
mm="0.0"
inch="0.00"

[rain_1h]
mm="0.0"
inch="0.00"

[pressure_absolute]
hpa="---"
inHg="---"

[pressure_relative]
hpa="1027.0"
inHg="30.33"

[nlucier]

I'm going to break all forum etiquette here, but oh well.

THREAD NECRO! since perusing the entire La Crosse forum doesn't show anything else regarding these 2810 or 2812 devices.


Has this been looked into at all since Nov 28, 2009, particularly using the current.lst file as the prior poster relayed? That plain text file is updated constantly and is basically what Heavy Weather uses for it's own display in addition to writing to the history.dat (binary) every interval that you've set in HW. It seems that the current.lst file gets written without HW running, so my guess is it's the WV5Communication service that is installed when setting up the 2812UT that I have that is responsible for that file.

Like the OP, I acquired my 2812UT from Costco (along with one for my father who is also wanting better software). The one warehouse that I normally go to (among 5 that you can throw a softball to) went through several pallets of these stations. Based on that, I'm betting that there are a LOT of people that would like to move off of HW if given a decent chance.

Anything that I can provide in the way of captures or such to help get these devices to work in Cumulus? Looking forward to getting off of HW, but at this point it's the best looking working software...Please help me change that view!

[steve]

Anything that I can provide in the way of captures or such to help get these devices to work in Cumulus?

The only things that you could provide that would help would be days with more than 24 hours in them, or already written, working code. I can only do so much.

If you can get your data into easyweather.dat format, as someone has done with their WMR200 (using WUHU, I think) then Cumulus could read that.

[mfrazzz]

New to the forum, Cumulus, etc, so pardon for dredging up this old post, but wanted to show what I've done...

I purchased a LaCrosse WS-2813U from Costco and set it up last week. Have now been wanting to create a web page so started looking into options and kept coming across beautiful pages running Cumulus. With the price being right (ie: Free ) I started looking into it, but quickly saw my unit was not on the supported list. Decided to search the forums, and found this thread. Well, with Steve's last post, that set me on another search to find out how to create a usable file out of WUHU. That led me to DigbyDave's post https://cumulus.hosiene.co.uk/viewtopic.p ... 432#p37432 and his WUHU_Cumulus Action Template files that will create an easyweather.dat file. As a complete n00b to all of this, it took me awhile (and more googling) to find how to get this working properly (put the Actions.txt file in the WUHU directory, and create a templates directory for the template. Then create an action in WUHU's interface that points to the the actions.txt file. And the big "a-ha" for me was going into WUHU's setup -> General Settings, and checking write currdat.lst and checking Write Extended Data, and pointing this to a new directory under WUHU that I call data).

So now I had a working easyweather.dat file. Now I configured Cumulus. For Station Type, EasyWeather (using .dat file), I set the EasyWeather interval to 1 min, pointed the Easyweather.dat box to the location that WUHU is writing the file to. I played around with some of the checkboxes and filled in items that seemed to apply to me.

Next I set up the Internet settings, and was able to publish the basic web page, and IT WORKED! So yes, I have to have HeavyWeather running, which updates the currdat.lst file. WUHU then reads that file, creates its extended version of currdat.lst and then creates the Easyweather.dat file for Cumulus. Cumulus then reads Easyweather.dat, processes the data and uploads to the internet for my website! (Hmmm... so how many points of failure do I have there? )

Ok, not wanting to stop there, I then took the plunge to use a custom template. For now I chose Sunny Weather by JacquesD (https://cumulus.hosiene.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=6255). I saw that n9mfk had created a PHP version (found here: https://cumulus.hosiene.co.uk/viewtopic.p ... 5&start=52) and used that. Did some minor changes, and wow! I'm a very happy camper right now

You can check out my new site here:
http://www.frazierhome.net/wx

I'm still tweaking and playing, but overall I'm very happy to have this working.

So in short, it takes some work, but yes, LaCrosse WS-2810, 2812, 2813, C86234 can work with Cumulus.

NOTE: For those attempting this configuration, since WUHU is the primary feed off the actual currdat.lst file, I recommend using WUHU to do your data uploads to PWS, WUnderground, WeatherBug, etc...

[BUFULO]

mfrazzz,

Not to derail the topic, but I also have a 2813 (replaced my WeatherWise/Fine Offset 1080). I'm curious is you have actually checked that what is being reported to Weather Underground by WUHU (or Cumulus?) matches the data in Heavy Weather's currdat.lst file. Mine doesn't. It appears that WUHU is filtering the data somehow because it does track (scale) but is always low by about 10 mph (not exactly & not a metric conversion issue). Does using the extended data and/or Cumulus fix this issue?

[mfrazzz]

Funny you should mention this... I was just looking at my CWOPS data, and for my barometric pressure it is WAY off (not even close). I can see graphs from cumulus appear to be closer, so I'm not sure what WUHU is doing for this (my Temp, Dew Point, and Wind Info seem to correlate with MADIS though) . I'm now going to be looking at this more to compare things. I may have to take back my comment about using WUHU to report readings over Cumulus.

As for the Extended Data, I'm not sure if that goes into the upload reports or not. You can tweak your data with WUHU (make sure you don't have anything there unexpectedly, or use that to adjust things if you can come up with what is incorrect).

[BUFULO]

I have no idea why your other data would be incorrect. Everything else seems OK with my setup. The only thing that is incorrect on Weather Underground (& also in the WUHU GUI) for me is wind speed (including gust).

WUHU is posting numbers that don't match anything that I can readily see at least. The data file WUHU exports shows the same numbers for the fields Wind Speed & Wind Gust but none of those match what it sends to WU. WUHU appears to be only looking at the current wind speed field in currdat.lst & keeping track of wind speed & gust based on that alone, probably using a running average & windowing. Apparently the gust data is not written to currdat.lst by Heavy Weather (the service, assuming that is what actually writes to that file) so WUHU has no other choice.

I'm not sure if the history file written by Heavy Weather is any better (since it's binary & not readily viewable). Assuming it matches the data shown in the Heavy Weather GUI under the Data tab, it is closer to the numbers displayed on the console & in the HW GUI, but still not exact. I guess the only way to get the same data shown on the display is to use a direct connection. Lame.

This seems to be entirely a La Crosse software issue - junk software written by lazy software engineers. The hardware seems OK so far.

[mfrazzz]

Well I figured out my barometric pressure problem. Seems when I was setting WUHU up, I saw where you entered your altitude on the Tweaks screen and had enabled to send QNH to CWOPS. I've now turned it off a few hours ago and can see my graph is now normalizing and matching other stations around me...

I haven't looked into the windspeed yet. Could it be that WUHU is sending a 10 minute average speed or somesuch? Under Tweaks there is for Weather Underground to always report average wind speed and pressure.

[KDaddy]

mfrazzz- First, I was to Thank You for posting this information and am impressed with your site.

I also bought the same unit and have followed you post but am stuck on one thing, hoping you might be able to help. Here is what I have down so far.

-Heavy Weather Installed and collecting data.
-WUHU Installed and is reading the data from Heavy Weather. (it is uploading to Weatherunderground site as well)
-I have WUHU Outputting the currdat.lst with Write Extended Data enabled and pointing to a data.lst file. it looks to be working.

After that, you post jumps to having a working easyweather.dat file. I am a little lost on that part. Can you tell me what you did to get the .dat file?

I installed Cumulus and see how to apply the .dat file, but am stuck on that part.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank youm
Kevin

[jmd]

I was coming to ask that exact question, got it all working up to that point.

The .lst file it's outputting looks fairly standard, ie I can open it up and the text is all readable and looks to be in a format that cumulus might be able to understand, I can't get cumulus to show anything though, tried various file extensions and various options within cumulus.

Any help would be great.

[mfrazzz]

After that, you post jumps to having a working easyweather.dat file. I am a little lost on that part. Can you tell me what you did to get the .dat file?

Well, the post didn't jump, I referenced another thread that had a file you need and how to use that file in WUHU. Since apparently this wasn't completely clear (after rereading it, I can see where that could be missed), I've updated my post to hopefully make the instructions more clear, but in a nutshell, you have to go here: https://cumulus.hosiene.co.uk/viewtopic.p ... 432#p37432 and get the file in that post and then use what I posted to set up the "Action" in WUHU and it will create the easyweather.dat file.