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Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Discussion specific to Fine Offset and similar rebadged weather stations
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glen.day
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Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Post 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.
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steve
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Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Post by steve »

Whoops. I'll have a look at it.

Steve
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steve
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Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Post 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
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glen.day
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Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Post 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!
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steve
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Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Post 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
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glen.day
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Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Post 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:
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steve
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Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Post 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
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glen.day
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Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Post 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.
glen.day
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Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Post 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
philcdav
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Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Post 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)
Phil - G0DOR
philcdav
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Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Post 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
Phil - G0DOR
harrym1byt
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Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Post 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.
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GeniSim
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Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Post 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
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glen.day
Posts: 105
Joined: Wed 16 Jul 2008 11:55 pm
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Re: Rain Not Correct (EasyWeather/Cumulus)

Post 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
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