Sandaysoft

Thank you for the software,C1 & C2,all these people who complain about it are ignorant,about its true value,& how the GUI is superior compared to my EasyWeather stuff,your site,software & membership motivated me to buy a WS from Maplin,at a great price,Thank You,once again,Regards,Ray

just wanted to comment on the 'documentation is crap' and similar works of fantasy I see referenced.

This is a hobby project for Steve, thank God he has shared his fantastic work with all of us, the vast majority of whom are eternally grateful, more so if we have had the misfortune to use other 'commercial' weather station software.

Cumulus is a great bit of software, it works, works well and works reliably. I have *cough* years of professional experience with commercial systems from £500 to £5M and cant as easily say the same of them!

Documentation is never complete, when a project stops changing usually the documentation stops getting updated too. Cumulus evolves, the documentation I've read has been fine. Its also actively contributed to, directly or indirectly, by other enthusiasts sharing their experience and work. We live on the net, if at first you don't succeed, GOOGLE it, the answers are all out there.

We are all here for fun and enjoyment, we all (mostly) do other things as our day to day careers, probably mostly unrelated to the weather, software or web sites.

If I was to need a fully documented step by step spoon fed guide for how to do everything I would honestly consider taking up a different hobby, the fun here is finding out, learning how to do it, seeing how someone else did it and looking to see how to apply it to our own sites.

I spent many hours trying to get my station working reliably with Cumulus via USB, Steve, who openly says he cant not support this, tried hard with me to make some progress. I only wish some commercial support I've been on the receiving end was as willing to help.

Bottom line, Cumulus is truly a great bit of software and I cant thank Steve enough for sharing it and continuing to develop it further. I'm looking forward to C2 and enjoying my hobby.

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http://weather.60redwood.com
http://stevewardell.wordpress.com
@stevewardell
@RedwoodWeather

Well spoken! I totally agree, and am sure almost all others using Cumulus do too! Well done to Steve!

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Steve J
Image Architect
http://www.imagearchitect.co.uk


http://www.imagearchitect.co.uk/weather/index.htm

Thanks for the great software (Cumulus 1). I hope you do eventually do come out with Cumulus 2. I love the look of the new interface. Hopefully you haven't given up on this project. Again thanks.

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La Cross WS-2315 l Cumulus 1.89 l Gentry Weather

I seem to be working on it again - it's in the middle of a bit of a restructure. Hopefully there will be a new version to try before too long.

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Steve
Sanday Weather
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Like Cumulus and want to support it? Please donate!

Waiting with bated breath here for C2. I bet the 8 Aug 09 record for most users online ever will get smashed on the day its released. Great forum. Keep up the good work.

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Dan

http://www.brisbaneliveweather.com



A man with a thermometer always knows the temperature. A man with two thermometers, not so sure.

Hi Guys, new here

Be good if there were some more screen shots of the new version 2 so we can have a look at the interface side without having to install it. I am not one to install and play with alpha and beta versions, but RC's I am happy to.

From what I have seen I would like to request if it is not there already an option to have a light (white) background instead of dark background for the display screens in C2.

Cheers

GW

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A few of our web sites • http://thatnetsite.com • http://dogsites.com.au • http://southwestphotography.com.au • http://eagleburra.com.au

The 'viewer' part of the new version 2 is similar to the first release of Cumulus 2, so the screenshots in the wiki are still a good indication of what it currently looks like.


The interface will be completely configurable eventually.

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Steve
Sanday Weather
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Like Cumulus and want to support it? Please donate!

All I can say steve, is echo the positive comments here....

You do this off your own back, its a cracking piece of kit, that WORKS, many of these stupid priced ones constantly fail, give inaccurate readings etc.

You do it, how YOU want to do it, tabs, or no tabs, i love the simple interface of C1, but C2 is also VERY sleek (and dare i say it about a program) sexy looking lol!!

How you see fit bruv, thats all that matters

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Rob,
Dyffryn History on WU Dyffryn on Twitter Dyffryn on WOW

I think you will find most if not all users agree totally with you, though I am sure Steve is very open and thankful for suggestions to improve Cumulus as in the end there is no point having a piece of software that no one finds of any use.

I look forward to a finished version 2 and I am sure Steve will have everything in it that he feels is required, it is already a great solution and his dedicated continued effort is not without thanks, though I am sure there are still many users that have not yet donated. So please if you use Cumulus and you DO find it helpful, just a few dollars each will help Steve continue to develop this great solution.

Cheers all

GW

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A few of our web sites • http://thatnetsite.com • http://dogsites.com.au • http://southwestphotography.com.au • http://eagleburra.com.au

Hello Steve
I think you are doing amazing things as a hobby with Cumulus and I am grateful for your support for sometimes stupid or ignorant users like me. I really should know better.

Ref. C2... I like tabs. Firefox introduced it and MS took it up. Mozilla have now put the paradigm into Thunderbird and I like it there too, although it can quickly eat up screen space if you can't turn off some toolbars etc..

Ref. black screen. I have old eyes. Coloured lines and text on black can be ghosted sometimes. If the screen is not 100% in colour registration with all colours, you can get a ghost around white text even. So I am less of a fan of the black screen.

I like the proposed approach of a monitoring engine and a separate visualisation module.

Just as an aside, 20 years ago I was involved in gathering. processing and storing monitoring data for a number of large landslides around a proposed hydro lake. We were monitoring hundreds, maybe thousands, of instruments, some of them by telemetry, some by datalogger at frequent intervals, some manually at various intervals. We collected raw data in measurement units, archived that separately (text file), and converted it to engineering units and stored that (binary). I set up an instrumentation database (dbase IV as it was) to store installation and data reduction information about each instrument, plus the required information for then drawing plots of the data (e.g. datapoints on the plot, date range, scales, names, captions, etc. as a named plot).

Subsequently, a Progress 4GL database was used to store all the plots and the instrumentation database, as well as some other systems. It included monitoring frequencies for each instrument (ordered up by the designer of the landslide remedial works) from which the technicians daily rounds and actions could be printed; the instrumentation database, including for each instrument all the constants and formulae required to convert from measurement to engineering units, and the dates and times on which they were to start (e.g. a weir might be changed from a V to a U on a certain date, or a borehole collar elevation may be changed); a set of alarm values for each instrument with a notification system, for when readings were outside expected or design levels; and so on. No matter how hard the programmers (banking background) tried to bend the transactional relational database paradigm to operate with time dependent data, they had to accept advice that RDBs are no good for time dependent data (e.g. you can't easily index it). So Progress wrote scripts to run two other pieces of software that were specifically written as time dependent databases. They were very fast compared to the relational database. A plot containing millions of datapoints could be on the screen in <6 seconds after pressing the go button. Clearly this is a different order of magnitude to Cumulus, but the ideas are portable.

Maybe this is the kind of thinking you have for separating the instrumentation database + data processing engine from the visualisation module of C2. Excellent plan. Perhaps if users want to edit data themselves, either they could do it from with Cumulus or they could export it (csv file?) to spreadsheet or other system.

Keep up the good work.

Regards
Graham

I must say I really like Cumulus 2 and appreciate the effort gone into this.

Also I think WPF can make applications look nice and possibly make it easier to make certain applications.
But Cumulus 2 Viewer is a bit slow graphically speaking. Like when dragging one of the popup windows around it feels sluggish as if there was no hardware acceleration at all. I'm suspecting WPF is the fault here or maybe WPF has a bug because I've experience this with other applications using the WPF.
Also generating the graphs take a long time compared to Cumulus 1 speeds.