Communication Error for 3 days

[Sisko]

Hope this is the right place for this.  I have searched the forums and can't find a solution to my problem so here goes.
I have a Davis Vantage Vue with WeatherlinkIP and Weathercat 2.  The other day we had a very brief power outage (20 seconds or so) which caused my MacBook Air to shut down.
Since then the loading process of Weathercat stops at ws23xx initializing and brings me to the communication setup.  Doesn't matter which parameters I choose as all bring up the message 'weather station not found'.
I press OK to clear that message and most of the time it just freezes on the screen.
I have rebooted the console, unplugged things, rebooted the computer, all multiple times with no luck at all.

Anyone have an answer?

[elagache]

Dear Sisko and WeatherCat troubleshooters,

Definitely not the best of circumstances to make your first post but nonetheless, welcome to the WeatherCat forum.

Hope this is the right place for this.  I have searched the forums and can't find a solution to my problem so here goes.
I have a Davis Vantage Vue with WeatherlinkIP and Weathercat 2.  The other day we had a very brief power outage (20 seconds or so) which caused my MacBook Air to shut down.
Since then the loading process of Weathercat stops at ws23xx initializing and brings me to the communication setup.  Doesn't matter which parameters I choose as all bring up the message 'weather station not found'.
I press OK to clear that message and most of the time it just freezes on the screen.
I have rebooted the console, unplugged things, rebooted the computer, all multiple times with no luck at all.

Anyone have an answer?

It sounds like of the preference files for WeatherCat got corrupted when your computer went down.   You can find that file at this path:

~/Library/Preferences/com.trixology.weathercat.plist

Where the ~ is a stand in for your home folder on your Mac.  Keep in mind that OS X has been hiding the Library folder by default since OS 10.7.   If your folder isn't already visible, try typing into your search engine of choice a phrase like this: Reveal Library folder OS 10.7.   Use the version of OS X you are actually using.  The technique varies from OS 10.7 to OS 10.10.

The best thing to do is to restore your preferences from a backup copy that was made before the problem occurred.  This would be a case where Time Machine is definitely your friend.  If you don't have that, you might try moving the file to the trash and see if WeatherCat stops crashing.  If that cures the problem, then you would have go through your preferences to put things back the way you initially had them.

I hope this is some help.

Cheers, Edouard 

[WCDev]

Edouard got in before me whilst I was composing this

It's possible the IP address of the logger has changed. At the station communications screen in WeatherCat select WeatherLink IP then enter the IP address of the logger. Hit the connect button and wait - there'll be a message saying it's trying to connect and it may take a few minutes. If after a few minutes it hasn't been able to connect, you'll get the failed to connect window.

In this case, check the IP address of your logger (try to connect to it by putting its IP address into your browser). If it's not there, find out its IP address (either from your router or via a network scanner such as Angry IP Scanner), and connect to it with your browser. If possible set it to a fixed IP address on your network so it doesn't change in the future. Quit your browser, then try again in WeatherCat. Also note that some versions of the logger can lock-up and not respond if they can't resolve the WeatherLink IP server address - this is why it's recommended to turn off uploads to WeatherLink from the logger.

[Blicj11]

If possible set it to a fixed IP address on your network so it doesn't change in the future.

This is a great suggestion. I reserve static IP addresses on my network for most of my devices to prevent two devices from grabbing the same address in a system restart. It shouldn't happen but every once in a while it does. Every router (within reason) manufactured in the last several years will let you reserve an IP address based on the MAC address of your device. What this means is that you can assign a fixed IP address to your WeatherLinkIP data logger so that when it reboots it will always grab the same IP address.

I am attaching a screenshot of using Airport Utility and an Apple router to reserve an IP address for your data logger. You can accomplish the same thing with a non-Apple router using its browser interface.

And welcome to the forum!

[Sisko]

Thanx a lot guys.  Things are back up and running.

Tried the library instructions with no luck so checked the weatherlinkip IP and found that on the communication setup it had changed.  Arrrrgg!  I should have checked that in the first place!

Nice to see people jumping in to help

Yes, this problem was my first post to the forum and won't be my last post, and hopefully no more problems.