Lost comms?

[Gman19]

For some reason last night at 5:15am, the log says the WCat lost comms with my Vantage pro2+.  I'm using WeatherlinkIP, and the weathercat manual says that it's okmfor the iMac to go to sleep if using the IP connection.

I woke the system up,at 7:45am, expecting it to download the recorded data from the WeatherlinkIP as it did Saturday morning.  But the data is wrong, and the erroneous data was fed to weatherunderground as can be seen if you go and look up station KNCGREEN49.

Once I woke the system up, everything started working normally again.  Would it be to my advantage to allow WeatherlinkIP to feed weatherunderground directly, therefore bypassing WeatherCat?  I think this might be the way to keep the integrity of the WU data, but I cannot figure where weathercat got the erroneous data to begin with.  Using the graph on my Vantage Pro2 console suggests the correct data is in the console, as the graphs on the console do not match weather cats graphs.  Is there a way to re-offload the data manually into weathercat?

[WCDev]

Hi GMan19,
Was the Mac asleep at 5:15am or awake? Normally WC can reconnect to a WeatherLink IP after sleep, but if there's any problems you're better off quitting WeatherCat before sleeping the Mac (or set it to shutdown at a specified time). Note, that for reliability we suggest not allowing the logger to upload to WeatherLink.com as this can cause it to become unresponsive for long periods of time, or permanently if it fails the DNS lookup for WeatherLink.com.

You can fix the data by first quitting WeatherCat then going to ~/Library/WeatherCatData/Location1/2012 (where ~ is your home directory) then opening the 9_WeatherCatData.cat file with a text editor (something like TextWrangler that won't mangle the file). Scroll to the end of the file and delete the lines back to the time of the last good data - each line in the file looks something like:
12430 t:091510 T:16.80 Ti:21.20 D:12.74 ...
the t: field holds the day, hour and minute, so in this example it's the 9th day at 1510.

Once this is done and WeatherCat has re-downloaded the data from the logger, see the following wiki entry to re-upload the data to Wunderground:
http://wiki.trixology.com/index.php/How_to_force_WeatherCat_to_submit_historical_data

Alternatively, if you have TimeMachine backing up your Mac regularly, quit WeatherCat then restore the WeatherCatData folder from a time prior to the bad data then start it back up again.

Finally, if you open Applications->Utilities->Console.app and have a look through the log around the time you woke the Mac up, are there any entries from WeatherCat that might indicate why it didn't download the data?

Many thanks,
Stu.

[Gman19]

Thanks Stu,
I cannot locate the 9_weathercatdata.cat file anywhere...even the search function returns no result. 

I can go to my home folder>documents>weathercatreports>2012>sep and there are PDF reports there, but I do not know where the data file is.

I'm running a new iMac i7 with mountain lion.  Only had the iMac for about a month and still learning my way around it.

Anything you can suggest?  When the search function came up empty...I didn't know what else to try.

Thanks!

[Steve]

Gman,

You can find the file located in ~/Library/WeatherCatData/Location1/2012/9_WeatherCatData.cat

This is in your user library, not the system library under Macintosh HD/Library. If you are on Lion or Mountain Lion and have not yet exposed your hidden user Library, you can temporarily view it by going to the Go menu item while holding the alt/option key.

If you?d just like your ~/Library to be visible normally in the Finder, that?s easy too; just enter this command in Terminal:

chflags nohidden ~/Library

Hope that helps,
Steve

[Gman19]

Thanks Steve!

I found and edited out the bad data.
Weathercat reloaded and I'm good on this end.

Now onto the wiki to try and correct the WU uploads.

I'm still in my 14 day trial of WC, and I must say the support here has been phenomenal!

[Gman19]

Followed the Wiki to the letter...
I was able to find and edit the .plist file and replace the unix time stamp with the one from this morning...so far no dice.
The check box is checked to allow historical uploads in the WU configuration pane.
I'll try it again to see what happens. 
WC is uploading current data, but has not uploaded any corrected historical data...

[Gman19]

Ok...finally got historical data uploaded.

I think my problem was the first time I converted to unix time, I used my local time to convert.  The link in the wiki didn't say any different.

Converting my local time to GMT, then using GMT to Unix seemed to have more favorable results...at least that's what I think was going on...

Stu,
In your first reply, you suggested I not let the WeatherlinkIP upload to Weatherlink.com....how do I do this?

I thought the way WeatherLinkIP worked was that it automatically uploads to WeatherLinkIP.com once it's connected?

Thanks for all your responses!  I've learned a lot on my day off!

[Gman19]

Ok....

After a lot of google searches, trial & error, and perusing other forums, I finally got into the config interface of the WLIP and disabled the automatic uploads to WL.  I also unchecked the box in the hardware config pane of Weathercat that allowed uploads to WL.  At some point, my iMac will go to sleep overnight, and in the morning I'll post here the outcome of the evenings efforts.

One ponderance....
Does weathercat have the ability to upload to WeatherLink.com?
Reason for asking is the check box that I unchecked...

Seeing as how I disabled the automatic uploads in the WLIP itself, what does unchecking this box do?
Seems as if this box is checked, it might allow WC to upload to WL much as it does to WU & CWOP.

just wondering....

Thanks again to all for your help....you've really helped point me in the right direction!

[WCDev]

Hi Gman19,
The box in WeatherCat causes it to disconnect from the logger once per minute so the logger can upload the data to WeatherLink - the logger can really only do one thing at a time, so we have to disconnect to allow it to upload.

You can confirm the logger isn't trying to upload to WeatherLink.com by first quitting WeatherCat (so nothing is accessing the logger) and then going to the logger's IP address in your browser (the logger has a web page you can use for configuration) - it'll look something like the attached image.

Stu.

[Gman19]

Thanks Stu,
I did get into the configuration of the WLIP last night and disabled the WL uploads...
As a result, WeatherCat was purring along this morning without a glitch whatsoever!
When I brought up the iMac from sleep, Weathercat was running as if the iMac never slept.

Looks like I'll be registering my copy soon, you've done an excellent job at making this software worthy of running on my new system!

[Gman19]

Didn't want to start a new thread for this, but WC has lost my Vantage Pro Plus and can't find it.  WeatherlinkIP is working fine and is currently uploading to wearherlink.com, and feeding weather underground from there.  All IP addys are fine...don't know why WC has lost my station.  This happened after a router reboot last night...I've rebooted before with not an issue.  I'm running WC 1.0.1 on an iMac I7...OSX Lion.  Up until the router reboot, WC had been running flawlessly for at least 3 weeks...this has baffled me so far.

Thanks for any input!

[WCDev]

Sounds suspiciously like the router has assigned a different IP address to your logger. Check the logger from its web page, if it's set to a dynamic address give it a fixed IP so the problem doesn't happen again in the future.

[Gman19]

Hi Stu,
I should have posted previously that a renewed/changed IP isn't the case.  The WeatherlinkIP has its own reservation within the router so that it will always have the same IP assigned.  The port assignment is also unchanged (22222).  I can type in the IP and gain access to the WLIP config page as normal and it is uploading to WL.com flawlessly as well.  I've rebooted the iMac, and pretty much everything else except reboot the Vantage Pro2 console. 

This is weird!

I'll keep poking around with it over the weekend as I get time...any further suggestions from your end will also be welcomed and appreciated.

[Gman19]

Just thought I'd update my efforts/results...

I upgraded WC to version 1.02 Build 3 and still WC cannot find my Davis VP2+...this is wild...

[WCDev]

One thing you could try is open a terminal and ping the logger from the machine running WeatherCat - i.e.
ping xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
(where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the IP address of the logger).
For example:

Code: [Select]

Elsie:~ stu$ ping 192.168.1.110
PING 192.168.1.110 (192.168.1.110): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.1.110: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=1.862 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.110: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.957 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.110: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.967 ms(Hit ctrl-c to stop the ping)

If it's visible, it should reply. If it's replying to a ping then you know it's visible to WeatherCat (if it isn't, that's the problem - check the route between the machine running WeatherCat and the logger).

If it is replying to a ping but it isn't replying to polls from WeatherCat, it may be too busy or having some issues with something - check for any error codes reported on the logger's web-page, also try turning off the uploads to weather link.com, power it off, then back on again and check the settings stuck, then give it another try.

If still no good, check the router for port issues. Also check you have the right IP and port entered into WeatherCat (highly unlikely there'll be a problem here as it stopped working after a router reboot).

Stu.