Rainfall readings wont stop

[Jonathan Jefferies]

Hi.
Im experiencing a problem with my rainfall readings, Raspberry pi user. The reading keeps counting instead of staying on what rain has fallen, its like it has got stuck. Ive changed in calibration settings, multipliers for rainfall the 1 to 0 and it has stopped the rainfall counting but says Nan. Any ideas on what could be wrong. Could this be cumulus or the Instromet datalogger at fault.

Also in Today/Yesterday the temperature readings have not refreshed themselves and also got stuck?

Many thanks

[Hobbyist]

Hi Jonathan,

I too am using CumulusMX, a raspberry Pi MK3 and an Instromet logger and at present, all seems to work well.

The Instromet rain gauge as you know measures to a resolution of 0.01mm as it counts rain 'drops' as they pass through a photo optic cell arrangement.

I have in the past had a couple of 'funnies' where a spider managed to get into the enclosed section and put a web near the photo optic cells this caused interesting counts but not as much as yours! I also had an older version where the drain hole blocked and eventually the circuit board became submerged and corroded. Again with rain fall errors. May be worth having a look.

The sensor itself has 3 wires red/black for power and yellow for pulse output. It may be worth your while to disconnect the yellow wire and see if that stops the errors totally. You could put a volt meter from black to yellow, on the raingauge terminals and see if you have a 5v pulse train from the gauge. There should only be pulses if rain is present.

There is also a software update MX version 3043 is latest. Version 3042 had a ‘repair’ to Instromet rain rate. So it may be worth updating and this would also reboot Cumulus in the process.

Hope that helps.

Dave

[Jonathan Jefferies]

Hi
Thank you for the reply.
The rain gauge readings went haywire when it was raining. I only found out when i went to look at the temperature and the rainfall was 800mm and adding 4 mm every second. I have managed to stop the rain reading to 0.0 but all my files are messed up with wrong data and showing no rain for this month which is annoying. Good job i have my manual rain gauge and make records so i have back up.

In the edit rain section on the main page of cumulus, top right i have entered todays rain as 0.0, not sure if this is the correct way to do it. Im not sure what other settings the rain should be set at.

Ive been running cumulus mx since last August and had no problems apart from the temperature read -25 one day, again i had to go into the files and reset them all.

Also my today/yesterday readings have got stuck and show readings from 2 days ago. Not sure how to fix this.

Its nice to meet someone using the same equipment.

Jonathan

[Super-T]

Just a suggestion but can't you restore a backup form before the problem? Preferably so that thye data is still in the station.
Did you have the rain gauge and wind cables reversed? Silly question I know?

[Jonathan Jefferies]

The raingauge has been working from the day i installed it. This is the first problem ive had. Im tempted now on upgrading to new version of cumulus mx and starting again. I do need to look at the rain gauge though and check the wires to make sure everything is ok.

[Jonathan Jefferies]

Hi all

I still have the rain gauge problem. This morning checking my readings my rainfall amount was 445 mm and my manual rain gauge read 0.2. I have taken apart the rain gauge and all seems ok. I have updated cumulus to the new version. Im stuck now? Any ideas?
Thanks

[steve]

I may be misunderstanding, but it seems clear to me that your rain gauge is faulty - or at least, there is some related hardware problem, so I think Instromet are the correct people to be speaking to. If you turn on data logging in MX, it will show the raw data that it reads from the logger, incuding the rain counter.

[Jonathan Jefferies]

Hi
I have now installed a new rain sensor and seems to be working correctly and has fixed the problem of continuously reading. I have another problem. On my Cumulus rain display it reads, This Month: 391mm and This Year NaN mm. I have tried going into the ini files and reset them to 0 but the display still reads the same. I did go into the txt files but do i have to manually change every wrong reading.

Many Thanks

Jonathan Jefferies

[steve]

Cumulus calculates the monthly and annual rain totals at startup from the daily totals in dayfile.txt. If you restart MX to force it to re-calculate, the current totals are displayed near the start of the mxdiags file. If it's coming up with a undefined value, it could be that there's some weird value in one of the dayfile.txt entries presumably prior to the start of February.

[Jonathan Jefferies]

Hi Steve.

Ok thank you for the information will have a look.

Jonathan