Thursday, March 15, 2007

Virtual Weather Station Version 13.01p02

1. Completely finished French language version.
2. Updated NOAA server location for METAR reports.
3. Fixed problem with Weather Warnings not working (problem was introduced in Version 13.00).

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Virtual Weather Station Version 13.01p00

After two months of pure agony, I finally got the WMR100 to communicate to the weather station without loss of communication issues.

Turns out the USB.DLL that was provided by Oregon Scientific required some modifications to make it work properly with some computers, such as dual core processor.

Also fixed the issue with daily and monthly rainfall with the WMR100.

Completed the implementation of the French version.

The latest build can be downloaded here:

http://www.ambientweather.com/do30tr.html

Regards,

Ed

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Virtual Weather Station Version 13.00p20

I updated this version based on some issues that John Norman was experiencing.

Under Internet Network Connection, if you select Use Default Connection, there was a flag that would not get set and would cause the FTP transfers to timeout. This flag is now properly initialized.

I went to an updated compiler and it appears to be less forgiving. Thanks for the help, John!

I also addressed some lock-up problems (I have never been able to reproduce them and it could be OS dependent or processor dependent). Microsoft has notes on multi-processing and XP appears to be more stable then other operating systems, but I need to support these OS.

And now for some benchmarks (which I will be adding to each build). Your results will vary.

1. CPU: About 14-28%
2. Mem Usage: 20,000 K
3. Peak Mem Usage: 30,000 K
4. VM: 68,000 K
5. Threads 6 - 9

This appears to be better then most weather applications out there (not all but most :-)

You can download the latest version here:http://www.ambientweather.com/do30tr.html

Monday, October 16, 2006

Virtual Weather Station Version 13.00p19

Oops, in the previous version I fixed a problem with the WMR-968 and WMR-100 updating the panels before all of the sensors reporting in, but the fix caused another issue where the panels do not update after all of the sensors report in.

You can download the latest version here:

http://www.ambientweather.com/do30tr.html

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Virtual Weather Station Version 13.00p18

The software is now available as part of the main software build now and was formally released:

Fixed problem with WeatherFlash and Rapid Fire competing with each other's timing.
Fixed possible crashing problem.
Fixed problem with the Cable2 panel settings.

Please visit the following link for the latest download:

http://www.ambientweather.com/do30tr.html

Regards,

Ed

Monday, October 09, 2006

Virtual Weather Station Version 13.00p17

Finally, I figured out the problem with WeatherFlash. There is a size limitation (2048 bytes) defined in the Windows Internet API (wininet). The URL length would exceed 2048 bytes for the wflash2 string (which contains all of the high and low data).

This limitation was ignored by my old compiler, but my new compiler would not write a string larger then 2048 bytes. I changed this limit to 4196 and everyting works now. One month on the same problem - ouch.

Here is the download link:

http://www.wunderground.com/autoasp/downloads/vws_install.exe

I have also mistakenly removed the priority option for ftp transfers. This option was added again to the FTP General Settings.

By the way, there is a lot of mention to why the ftp transfers take so long. The issue is that it takes about 80% of the time to convert your screen image to the jpeg image and only 20% of the time to upload this image.

Thus, the ftp functionality is not necessarily slow, but creating a jpeg image from a bitmap image is.

I can not explain why it was slower with the last few builds, except for the aforementioned accidental deletion of the FTP General Settings FTP Priority.

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Virtual Weather Station Version 13.00p16

Greetings,

The good news is I was able to reproduce the WeatherFlash update problems with the historical file wflash2.txt. The bad news is I could not figure out why this was happening, although it appears the function was not getting enough priority. The good news is I boosted the priority and it has been working fine here for 3 days.

Here is the download:

http://www.wunderground.com/autoasp/downloads/vws_install.exe

Regards,

Ed