WeatherCat rain gauge issues

[blight]

yes neil i saw the precipitation channels as well.
When its raining though i didnt get any reading on the hourly rain rate and the total of 700 + ml for the Total is way over the top.
 My base unit says we have had 3-5 ml. Total. ( its only rained once for about 15 min so far this year )

I've actually poured some water through it now to test it and it shows on the base unit but not in Weathercat.

cheers

stu

[Neil]

I'll have another play when I get home tonight as apart from seeing that numbers were being recorded - I didn't take much notice about whether they were all in agreement as I'd just triggered it by rocking back and forth a couple of times. Rain is something we've certainly not been short of so far this year in the UK (nor last year). No doubt we'll have a drought as soon as I get fully set up though!!

Neil

[WCDev]

Hi stu,

The station driver outputs two values to WeatherCat - the first is a running total of all the rain seen by your station since it was powered up and the other is the current rain rate per hour. The total rain will start at 0 when the console is first powered up and increment over time to 9999. When it gets there it'll reset to 0 (this is Precipitation Total in the Live Data view).

From the total rain all other rain values are calculated - for example if at the start of the day the total rain was 100mm and at the end of the day the total rain is 110mm, then the daily rain is 10mm.

I've uploaded a test build which will dump the raw rain reading it's seeing to the console log:
http://resources.trixology.com/downloads/WeatherCat113B114.zip

I would suggest first powering down your console and remove the batteries, then remove the batteries from the external thermo/hygro unit and unplug the rain bucket cable, check the connector is clean and the cable is undamaged, then plug it back in. Put the batteries back in the thermo/hygro unit and the console and make sure all the sensors are being received correctly by the console.

Download the test build as above and get it running. With WeatherCat running, set it's sampling rate to 1 minute (Preferences->Misc 2). Put some water into the rain bucket so it tips two or three times, then wait a minute or two and check WeatherCat's daily rain gauge and rain rate. If they are reading, then all is good.

If they are showing 0, go to Applications->Utilities->Console.app, select 'All Messages' and look for a message from WeatherCat that looks something like:

11/01/2013 16:58:51.704 WeatherCat[47027]: WH1080 rain: 491.4

This is the raw rain as received from your station - it's output about once every 30 seconds - does it look sensible and consistent?

[Neil]

What is 'raw rain' a measurement of?

Neil

[blight]

OK pulled the batteries out. ( wondered why lights were still on, on the base station - USB delivers power to these units. didn't know that )  Left for 10 minutes.

installed software. ran through the setup etc and immediately Daily Rain and Raw Rain registered 10.62
within 10 minutes this had risen to 35.4 on both.
20 minutes later daily rain jumped to 60.18 but raw rain stayed at 35.4

the weather cat controller says we have had 49.6mm and the Mac console log shows 35.4
The base station shows 0 and it has NOT rained.

I squirted the rain bucket with a hose (its 10 m up a pole ) briefly.
The Base station gauge now shows 0.6mm
Daily rain is now showing 60.78 Raw rain 36.0 and the weather controller says we have now had 50.2mm
So at least the 0.6 mm was added to all the records.

Can a button be added to reset the rain recordings to zero or do i have to manually edit all the data in the Editor ?
How do i reset the all the records in the Raw Rain area back to 0 easily ?

[WCDev]

Your station seems to be putting out variable rain data. Can you try removing the batteries and unplugging it from USB - we need it to be powered down to reset it. If the rain in the console log isn't sitting at 0 after that (with no rain through the bucket), there isn't much more that can be done.

The quickest way of editing a lot of records is with a good text editor - something like TextWrangler (see WeatherCat and Data in the manual), alternatively you can start a new data set with the 'Delete Data' button in the Location/Colours pane of the preferences.

Neil, the raw rain is the total rain seen by the station in mm's - nearly all stations can output this, but some like Davis stations can output total, daily, monthly and annual.

[blight]

I have done that.
I have completely deleted everything ( in Library, Program, Preferences etc etc ).. Reinstalled and started again

This time on startup ( 10 min ago ) i got  1.42 in the Raw rain  and 1.42 in the Daily rain.
The console is showing 36.0

The Digitech console shows ZERO for rain.

All the data on the software supplied by the manufacturers on the PC version is working correctly.

[WCDev]

So if you leave it run now, we need to see everything stay as it is (assuming no rain). Leave it run for a few hours then check how the figures look.

[blight]

All appears to be working ok now.
I think the original value was a cached value from the console somewhere. We had about 1mm of rain this morning and it added it ok.
The test will be in 2 or so days. WE have a cat 4 cyclone bearing down on us. Probably won't have a weather station left if we get a direct hit ...LOL

cheers

Stu

Western Australia