Newbie: Reporting Questions

[Lynn]

We are new to WeatherCat and have some probably very basic questions, but we can't figure out the answers.

My 13 yr old son is doing a science fair experiment where he is monitoring the degradation of various types of plastic in fresh and salt water.  We will shortly have 8 10-gal tanks operating in our back yard for about 4 months.  As part of the experiment, he needs to keep track of the high/low and daily average temperature, and information about UV radiation (UV index, daily and accumulated dose).  Ideally, we would like to print out some kind of report/spreadsheet that lists that information on a daily (and if possible) weekly basis in a spreadsheet or graph, so we don't have to just copy it down by hand from the computer.   We don't need to share the data with anyone or post it on a website.

We have looked through the various forums, played with the software and read the manual (and had my older son try as well).  Anyway, we can't figure out the answers to the following questions. 

1)  We seemed to be able to print out a "basic graph" with external temperature, but not a basic graph with UV information.  We didn't seem able to print any custom graphs at all either. How do I print out graphs with UV data?

2)  We read somewhere that you should be able to convert the data to a pdf file, which presumably we could print.  But we couldn't figure that out either.

3)  Also, I can't tell if the UV reports that are made available on WeatherCat encompass all the possible UV data that you can get from the weather station.  Does it?  And if there is more than just the UV index info on WeatherCat, how do you get it?

We have a Vantage Pro2 (that we are adding a UV sensor to today) with a Davis datalogger.  We have an older iMac that runs 10.5.8.  We tried to install the Weatherlink software for Macs with absolutely no success.  Tried going to Silicon Labs for updated drivers, changing to 32 bit mode as recommended on forums and gave up.  Found Weathercat after trying the demo for Lightsoft.  I just signed up for the 14 day preview of the software yesterday, and I don't know if any of these issues/questions might resolve themselves after we paid for the software.  I just want to make sure the software can do what we need it to do for this experiment before I buy my second weather software.

I would greatly appreciate any help that you can give us.

Thanks,
Lynn and Justin

[elagache]

Dear Lynn, Justin, and WeatherCat fans,

Sorry this is going to be a very quick and incomplete reply.

My 13 yr old son is doing a science fair experiment . . . .   As part of the experiment, he needs to keep track of the high/low and daily average temperature, and information about UV radiation (UV index, daily and accumulated dose). 

Davis does have the daily and accumulated dose data being collected by the weather station.  However, I don't see WeatherCat having a channel for either dose measurement.  I could be wrong, I don't have the UV sensor.  However,  I suggest you contact Stuart Ball directly with your question.  He might jump on this posting fast enough but he might respond more quickly via email.   You can use the Email WeatherCat Support link off of help in WeatherCat to get the email address or check on the Trixology Website.  Sorry for the indirect route but don't want to feed da' spammers.

Good luck to you both, sounds like an interesting project!

Cheers, Edouard 

[Lynn]

Thanks.  I will try to email him directly.
Lynn

[WCDev]

Hello Lynn and welcome to the forum.

Edouard is correct in that only the UV index is available - the other data isn't available from the hardware, we would have to derive it from other data.

Currently it isn't possible to print custom graphs or the UV graph from within WeatherCat - the quickest way to print them is to press CMD-SHIFT-4 then the space bar. Your mouse will change to a small camera icon - move this over the graph and press the mouse button. An image will be saved on your desktop which can be opened and printed from within Preview.

What you might find useful is the daily and monthly reports WeatherCat generates. These are tabular reports created daily at midnight - the daily reports have rows for each hour of the day, with daily totals and averages at the bottom. The monthly reports are the same except the rows are daily data. These reports are saved at ~/Documents/WeatherCatReports as PDF files (where ~ means your home directory). Note that if WeatherCat isn't running at midnight, then no report is generated. These can also be emailed.

Good luck with your experiment!
Stu.