Topic: odd hourly rainfall reading

[madridwx]

I'm hoping that someone has perhaps seen this before.  While looking at my weatherunderground data (KIAMADRI1) for today I noticed that my hourly precipitation matched my total for the day.  When I dug in further I noticed the exact same thing was happening on my VWS readings on my PC.  The hourly exactly matched the total for the day.  Here's and example.

http://www.iowatelecom.net/~wsharp/broadcast.jpg

I've had a couple of rains since I downloaded VWS and those rains recorded the hourly rain just fine.  I was running VWS as a trail and I just purchased the registration this past weekend and this is the first rain since registration.  Any ideas as to what maybe going on?  I'm running VWS on a separate PC using TCP/IP to communicate with VirtualPC 1.1.4.  Thanks
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[Anthony]

Whay you are saying happened coule be possible depending on when the rain started and when you looked at the rainfall settings in vws. When during the rain event did this happen and did it go away as it continued to rain?

[madridwx]

I first noticed the issue last night.  It had been raining lightly all day long and the rain continued last night into this morning.  Now my hourly rain is setting at .79 inches.  Which is actully the total amount of rain we've seen in this event.

[madridwx]

Well think I've solved the issue.  I renamed the .csv file in the data directory and restarted VWS and it recreated the file.  After that the hourly rain fall retunred to 0.  Thats what it should be since I've not had any rain since this morning.  Also it appears that my wind gust was stuck at 17mph.  That gust happened at 1AM this morning, but up until I rebuilt the .csv file my wind gust was constantly saying 17mph.  Very strange.

[Anole]

Check your dbase.csv  for any messed lines. It's not uncommon for VWS to plug a messed up line in the file. You can usually tell if thats the case by lookig at your graphs. If they have spike at the very beginning you have at least one messed up entry in the dbase.csv file.

The messed up entries are pretty easy to spot. They will have a bogus data field that looks something like:

2155232551000

instead of

200612211545

[madridwx]

Thanks for the heads up.  I took a look at the dbase.csv file that I archived and sure enough on Monday night at 11:30PM the 2155102552600 entry was in the dbase file.  And thats when my strange issues began.

This is why I love this forum.  Many many experts to help people out.

Willard

[Anole]

Glad to help. You deserve some credit for being able to decode my post. I swear I wasn't drunk when I wrote it, but it sure reads that way!  

[weatheroz]

Check your dbase.csv  for any messed lines. It's not uncommon for VWS to plug a messed up line in the file. You can usually tell if thats the case by lookig at your graphs. If they have spike at the very beginning you have at least one messed up entry in the dbase.csv file.

The messed up entries are pretty easy to spot. They will have a bogus data field that looks something like:

2155232551000

instead of

200612211545

Yeah, and look for all the new bogus whatever.csv files that it creates.

Sounds like that bug from early 2004 is still there, unfixed after all this time.  

[Anthony]

I'm glad you got your problem fixed. But just out of curosity. What weather station do you have and do you leave your computer running 24/7?

[madridwx]

I have a Davis Vantage Pro 1 cabled weather station.  One computer runs VirtualVP and WeatherLink 5.7 24x7 and I have VWS on a separate PC and it used TCPIP to talk with VirtualVP.  The VWS PC also runs 24x7.  I'm just getting started using VWS.  I'm hoping to dive into it more during the X-Mas holiday since I'm taking that week off from work.  

[Anthony]

The reason I asked was. Some people who do not let their systems run 24/7 seem to be the ones who what the problems with future dates in the database files. Another thing that might cause this would be if you shut vws down about the time it was updating the database file. We might never really know.

[Anole]

It's not just the timestamp that gets messed up. The data values are bogus as well. In my case it happens at least once a month and it doesn't correspond to any activity such as shutdowns, restarts etc. I run 24/7/365 and VWS has always done this. The problem has occurred on more than one PC as well.

At least it's easy to find and fix once you know what to look for.

[Anthony]

To the best of my knowledge this has never happened to me. Atleast no as for as I can tell. Would be nice to know what causes it. I wonder if there is some sort of scheduled task that runs that is causing it.

[weatheroz]

The reason I asked was. Some people who do not let their systems run 24/7 seem to be the ones who what the problems with future dates in the database files. Another thing that might cause this would be if you shut vws down about the time it was updating the database file. We might never really know.

But mine was running 24/7 and I was relying on vws to get it right, unfortunately with those issues it got it more wrong than right.

Seemed to pick the year 2155 a lot though.

[weatheroz]

It's not just the timestamp that gets messed up. The data values are bogus as well. In my case it happens at least once a month and it doesn't correspond to any activity such as shutdowns, restarts etc. I run 24/7/365 and VWS has always done this. The problem has occurred on more than one PC as well.

At least it's easy to find and fix once you know what to look for.

Yeah, once you knew to expect it to happen more often than not though.

Oh yes, you can find it and fix up the errors, but boy was it a huge job to do it all the time.

[weatheroz]

To the best of my knowledge this has never happened to me. Atleast no as for as I can tell. Would be nice to know what causes it. I wonder if there is some sort of scheduled task that runs that is causing it.

You have been a very lucky fellow then for it to have never occurred to you.

Whilst you can simply go back and edit those text files, having to do it several times a week, and sometimes even multiple times a day, became too unreliable for my liking and caused me to move to WD which has been a whole lot more STABLE.

[Anthony]

I guess thats the beauty of computers. Maybe vws is trying to update and upload at the same time? Have you looked to see if the times match up?

[Anole]

In my case they do not. I'm not using VWS to do any uploads.

[madridwx]

I am using VWS to upload to weather underground, but I'm not doing any other uploads to the internet.