Welcome to our new Ambient Weather Blog, where we will discuss interesting new weather products and features, upcoming discussions to our flagship product, Virtual Weather Station, and features on our website, http://www.ambientweather.com.
We are busy making changes to Virtual Weather Station. One of the key problems that will be addressed in the next version is the loss of communication to the VantagePro2 weather station.
I was never able to reproduce this problem, so I decided to dedicate many hours to solving it.
To fill you in on the difficulty in finding this problem, I set up five computers all running Virtual Weather Station and Vantage Pro units with five data loggers, five different operating systems, and then hammered them with communication. I found that the VantagePro.dll we use has a flaw in that it will lose communication if you request the daily highs and lows. This is intermittent and may be related to reading and writing data at the same time (the console writes the data, the software reads the data). By removing this function, the problem went away.
This is itself should not be a problem if the timeout function worked properly, but it does not. The communication is lost until you restart the program.
Removing this function has little impact. It was possible that Virtual Weather Station could miss the high wind gust for the day. I will be using a more direct method to get this data (direct communication that circumvents the higher level commands associated with the DLL).
Why do we use the DLL? Davis Instruments developed this tool to make programming easy. Virtual Weather Station calls this DLL to download archived data and update data real-time. It results in less bugs and problem free operation.
There are some drawbacks - the communication rate is slower, and we can not easily debug problems like the loss in communication problem.
Davis has released a new VantagePro.dll which will offer archiving of all the auxillary sensors as well as calculate THW and THWS, but there is a bug - it will not download archvied data.
We are busy making changes to Virtual Weather Station. One of the key problems that will be addressed in the next version is the loss of communication to the VantagePro2 weather station.
I was never able to reproduce this problem, so I decided to dedicate many hours to solving it.
To fill you in on the difficulty in finding this problem, I set up five computers all running Virtual Weather Station and Vantage Pro units with five data loggers, five different operating systems, and then hammered them with communication. I found that the VantagePro.dll we use has a flaw in that it will lose communication if you request the daily highs and lows. This is intermittent and may be related to reading and writing data at the same time (the console writes the data, the software reads the data). By removing this function, the problem went away.
This is itself should not be a problem if the timeout function worked properly, but it does not. The communication is lost until you restart the program.
Removing this function has little impact. It was possible that Virtual Weather Station could miss the high wind gust for the day. I will be using a more direct method to get this data (direct communication that circumvents the higher level commands associated with the DLL).
Why do we use the DLL? Davis Instruments developed this tool to make programming easy. Virtual Weather Station calls this DLL to download archived data and update data real-time. It results in less bugs and problem free operation.
There are some drawbacks - the communication rate is slower, and we can not easily debug problems like the loss in communication problem.
Davis has released a new VantagePro.dll which will offer archiving of all the auxillary sensors as well as calculate THW and THWS, but there is a bug - it will not download archvied data.
posted by Ambient Weather at 9:47 AM
3 Comments:
Welcome to blogspot!!
Is this just an informational every so often blog?
The purpose of the blog is to inform users of changes to Virtual Weather Station, Weather Exchange and weather stations in general.
This is a perfect place to post pre-release software.
I am looking for the functions within the VantagePro.dll... if anybody can help me I would be very gratefull.
Thanks in advance!
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