Author Topic: New Vantage Vue - Setup WeeWX on Ubuntu VM  (Read 1892 times)

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Offline rayman

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New Vantage Vue - Setup WeeWX on Ubuntu VM
« on: January 08, 2017, 11:06:03 AM »
Hi there,

My first station was an Acurite 5-in-1 hooked into the WeatherDisplay software.  Both pieces had their issues, and the Acurite kept breaking, so now I've got a new Davis Vantage Vue and USB WeatherLink device and I want to try out WeeWX.  I'm running into some issues, but before I simply throw my issues at the forum, I wanted to understand a little bit more about how these devices work.  I'm running Windows 10 x64 version 1607, which seems to have correctly identified the USB device as a "Silicon Labs CP210x USB to UART Bridge (COM3)".  The console is set to output at 19200 baud, and the Davis WeatherLink program in Serial mode sees the Vantage Vue console on this port at 19200 baud.  So it's communicating on the Windows 10 host.  With this said, before we go any further, I have two questions:
  • Is it correct to assume that for all intents and purposes, from an application perspective in this configuration, the Vantage Vue console is connected by a serial port and not USB?
  • If so, does the software request data from the console on this port, or is the console continuously streaming data out of this port?
The reason I feel these two questions are important is because I'm not really familiar with how serial ports are supposed to work, and it will help me diagnose what's going on with my VM.

The VM is running Ubuntu Server 14.04.4 on VirtualBox via the Windows 10 host.  I have the Serial Port specified as a Host Device on COM3, IRQ 4, I/O Port 0x3E8.  The port seems to be there and configured correctly.

setserial -a /dev/ttyS2
returns:

/dev/ttyS2, Line 2, UART: 16550A, Port: 0x03e8, IRQ: 4
  Baud_base: 19200, close_delay: 50, divisor: 0
  closing_wait: 3000
  Flags: spd_normal skip_test


weewx.conf is configured to use /dev/ttyS2 at 19200, but /var/log/syslog shows (this is with debug =1 in weewx.conf):

Jan  8 10:44:18 MYSERVER weewx[1128]: vantage: driver version is 3.0.9
Jan  8 10:44:18 MYSERVER weewx[1128]: vantage: Opened up serial port /dev/ttyS2; baud 19200; timeout 4.00
Jan  8 10:44:22 MYSERVER weewx[1128]: vantage: retry  #0 failed
Jan  8 10:44:26 MYSERVER weewx[1128]: vantage: retry  #1 failed
Jan  8 10:44:30 MYSERVER weewx[1128]: vantage: retry  #2 failed
Jan  8 10:44:34 MYSERVER weewx[1128]: vantage: retry  #3 failed
Jan  8 10:44:34 MYSERVER weewx[1128]: vantage: Unable to wake up console
Jan  8 10:44:34 MYSERVER weewx[1128]: import of driver failed: Unable to wake up Vantage console (<class 'weewx.WakeupError'>)
Jan  8 10:44:34 MYSERVER weewx[1128]: engine: Unable to load driver: Unable to wake up Vantage console
Jan  8 10:44:34 MYSERVER weewx[1128]:     ****  Exiting...


Several articles I've read said you should be able to use a command like minicom -b 19200 -D /dev/ttyS2 or screen /dev/ttyS2 19200 and send a TEST string to the serial port and it should return TEST back.  That's not happening in my case, so I think either the port is not configured correctly, or this test is invalid for some reason (i.e., maybe that's not how the Vue console connection should work).

Any help would be appreciated, especially the answers to the first two questions :)

Thanks
« Last Edit: January 08, 2017, 11:10:26 AM by rayman »

Offline rayman

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Re: New Vantage Vue - Setup WeeWX on Ubuntu VM
« Reply #1 on: January 10, 2017, 11:24:25 AM »
I figured it out.  For some reason doing a baud rate of 19200 generates CRC errors, but they are actually communicating.  Going down to 9600 fixed it.