Cannot open Station Hardware Options

[Blicj11]

I am running WC 3.3.1 Build 8 under macOS Ventura 13.7.2.

I have just discovered I cannot open Station Hardware Options in Tools. I get the spinning beachball in WeatherCat and it stops functioning. I have to Force Quit WC and then it automatically restarts. If I then quit WC, it auto starts after 30 seconds. I cannot keep it from auto starting unless I reboot the iMac. I trashed the plist file and used my backup from 6 months ago, which didn't change anything. I then tried going back to an older version of WC (3.3.0 Build 300) but that didn't fix the problem. So now I am stumped. Any suggestions will be most appreciated.

[elagache]

Dear Blick and WeatherCat troubleshooters,

Sorry to hear about your predicament.

I am running WC 3.3.1 Build 8 under macOS Ventura 13.7.2.

I have just discovered I cannot open Station Hardware Options in Tools. I get the spinning beachball in WeatherCat and it stops functioning. I have to Force Quit WC and then it automatically restarts. If I then quit WC, it auto starts after 30 seconds. I cannot keep it from auto starting unless I reboot the iMac. I trashed the plist file and used my backup from 6 months ago, which didn't change anything. I then tried going back to an older version of WC (3.3.0 Build 300) but that didn't fix the problem. So now I am stumped. Any suggestions will be most appreciated.

It is hardly a surprise, but I can open up the Station Hardware Options from ancient MacOS Mojave.  You have a lot of things going on at once.  In order to facilitate troubleshooting, it might be a good idea to turn off "monitor and restart WeatherCat" so that you can perform other diagnostics.  Could you manage to do that in the 30 seconds that WeatherCat is running?

I would try the increasingly common Rx for WeatherCat issues on newer versions of MacOS.  Try to get as early a backup of WeatherCat data you can permit yourself and still have the remainder in the Davis data logger.  I would then replace the preference file as you so diligently wrote up on the WeatherCat Wiki and replace the WeatherCat data at the same time before attempting to launch WeatherCat.  You might stay at WeatherCat 3.0.0 instead of 3.0.1, but Stu didn't change a lot of code so this really shouldn't make any difference.

Sorry, not a lot of constructive advice.  I have a feeling that there some additional MacOS "improvements" that we are struggling against.  Unfortunately, I wouldn't know where to look for these sort of changes to be documented.

Let us know if any of this is helpful.

Edouard

[Blicj11]

Thanks for your suggestions. I have made a little progress. I can now open Station Hardware Options and Test Power System runs properly. But I cannot change my DataLogger interval. See attached.

[Steve]

Is this the message you guys are getting?

Station comms reset FAILED. Weather is no longer updating. Please check station and USB/serial connections then reboot WeatherCat.

WeatherCat TimeStamp: 08:31:44 13-Jan-25


Mine apparently rashes a couple hours after we left home for two months. I’ll take a look to see if there’s anything I can do remotely tonight if I can get in.

[elagache]

Dear Blick, Steve, and WeatherCat troubleshooters,

Thanks for your suggestions. I have made a little progress. I can now open Station Hardware Options and Test Power System runs properly. But I cannot change my DataLogger interval. See attached.

Sorry that you are continuing to have issues.  Is there any reason to believe that it is your home intranet that is having problems?  Since you have an IP-based data logger, communication faults would produce exactly what you are observing.  This sort of technology is of course very reliable, but these electronic devices do fail from time to time.

. . . .
Station comms reset FAILED. Weather is no longer updating. Please check station and USB/serial connections then reboot WeatherCat.
 . . . 

For better or worse, this is a different problem.  It has something to do with your USB setup - not intranet.  Unfortunately, I cannot think of any easy way to troubleshoot this sort of thing remotely.  Did you make any changes to your Mac setup recently that would have perturbed your USB devices and/or hubs?

Let us know what each of you discovers respectively.

Edouard

[Steve]

Nope, haven’t touched it other than a restart a couple of days before we left. I haven’t been able to get in remotely from my phone. I’ll try my laptop in a day or two. Otherwise, the site is down until March when we return.

[Blicj11]

I've been seeing that message, Steve. It's happened to me twice in the past couple of months. I've been resetting the data logger and it seems to fix things for a while. I'm now wondering if my original Data Logger (12 years old) is my culprit.