Vantage Pro2 Console Failure

 Things had been running well for 20 months or so. Then on around Oct. 11, 2016, the weather station stopped updating. The Vantage Pro2 console was frozen at whatever time it failed. Repeated attempts to reset, power-off/on failed. Eventually the display went completely blank. A call to Davis confirmed it needed to be repaired. $82 and a couple weeks later I had the console up and running, but the weather wasn't updating. Searching the Weewx forum, it appeared my datalogger likely had some corupted data, and probably not surprising since the console went thru many power resets. Weewx has a utilty to clear data from the datalogger, which solved the problem.

More Missing History

 Making some progress in possibly restoring the bulk of my station history. I have been uploading data to Weather Underground since the beginning (2008) and found there is a couple ways to get data back from them. I have downloaded my history in a series of CSV files, merged them together, and manipulated the data to match up with the Wview/Weewx archive database. The biggest issue was converting date time back from YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS to Unix Epoch time. I've made some progress and imported the CSV to SQLite, so things may be looking up. Still a bit of work to do.

Missing History

 Well I guess I really screwed up. Looks like I lost my weather history from 2010-2014. I had thought that I copied to wview archive file from my Ubuntu PC, but apparently the one I copied was an older one from 2009. It was in the location described as the place where Wview archives were stored, but I guess the location moved depending on what version of Wview was installed. I had looked at the data briefly, and saw data from 2009, so I thought I was good. But, still it all could have been avoided if I didn't decide the give Linux Mint a try on the old PC. I should have waited until I knew for sure I didn't need any files from that machine. I wonder if there is a way to extract data back from Wunderground. At least daily min/max values.

CSS Changes

 As far as I can tell, the CSS for Bootstrapped is whacked. Probably for a good reason, but it is near impossible to edit like a normal stylesheet. I had to create a new stylesheet to override the styles I wanted to change. I tried to use Firebug inside Firefox, but that apparently also had trouble with the stylesheet. I couldn't get it to work the way I usually do. Anyway, I eventually got things the way I want, for now. It is a color scheme I have used before and is to my liking. Now I need to fin out why my much of my weather history is missing.

Getting the details worked out (Feb. 12, 2015)

 After a few days of sorting things out, I think things are running fairly well now. It took a while to figure out how to get the gauges to show US units with the proper divisions. Finding where the code was that controls the date format of the graphs took some time too. I had been running WView on Ubuntu for several years. I had to reboot things about once a month due to the USB converter issues with the Davis unit. But a desire to switch to a Raspberry Pi was completed a few weeks ago, and the instances of USB problems increased. A real solution could not be found in the WView forums,and though a solution is likely possible via WView, I did not expect to see that happen. Weewx may be less prone, and a simple solution seems to be indicated in the User Guide. We'll see. No problems after several days of running.

New Design Rain Collector (Feb. 12, 2015)

 I saw on the Davis Instruments website that they have a new design rain collector. This has been sorely needed. The two main problems with it were birds landing on the rim of the collector and dropping seeds and various other debris in to the collector. Eventually, it will plug up the hole, as it is shaped like a funnel. There was a debris shield, but it was inadequate. Mine disappeared. Either a bird took it, or it blew away in to the field. It was light and nothing held it in place. So eventually, the collector will clog up and the rain reading would be incorrect, and the collector would need to be cleaned out, which might be every two weeks in the summer. I also had to put a kludgy ring of chicken wire around the collector to disuade birds from landing there. Sometimes worked, sometimes not. The new design has an improved debris filter and serious pokers to discourage bird landings. I have one ordered.

Early History 2008-2015

 I started this "BLOG" in 2015, when I enabled a skin named "Bootstrap" to WeeWx.  It had a page for "News", so I decided to utilize it.  It was kind of a pain to keep updated, but I think I caught most of the major events from 2015-2017.

From 2017 to 2020, it ran mostly care free.  Once every few months there might be a power glitch, or some issue with the Davis datalogger that caused a problem.

See my posts after Dec. 29, 2020 for latest info.

Here I will summarize major events from 2008-215 (that I can remember).

I purchased a Davis Vantage Pro2 around February 2008.  Initially I was using Weatherlink(?), which was either a Davis thing or Ambient Weather (where I purchased it from).  It ran on Windows.  I think I had it running on an older PC at the time.  I was having a number of issues, mostly just the data not updating.  I got tired of messing with it, so I put together a small PC and loaded Ubuntu, and started using a program named WView.

I didn't have much experience with Linux, so that was always a bit of a struggle, but I got it all working and used WView for several years.  I still was having some issues, and after reading WView docs and forums I realized that probably a lot of my problems were likely caused by a problem with the Serial to USB converted Davis supplied with the datalogger.  Apparently it was a known issue, and unfortunately the developer of WView would not try to workaround the problem in software.  He did not want to try to correct hardware issues.  I could see his point, but the sign of really great software is something that can overcome hardware problems like they never happened.

Somewhere 20012 or so, the Davis sensor unit started to have issues, usually quitting in the middle of the night.  I was able to find info on the web from other users, and it was a bad capacitor in the sensor unit that helps the battery maintain charge.  I was able to order the part and replace it myself.  Also, the battery itself has died eventually, twice so far I think.

I don't remember exactly when, but I had been placing the weather website on a subdirectory of another website I was running.  At one point, I shut that down, so I decided to host the website on the Raspberry-Pi.  I obtained the domain k2as.us.  K2AS is my FCC Amateur Radio callsign.  The weather info also goes out to a system called APRS, but that's a whole other story.  Anyway, I had to run Apache web server on the Pi as well and have a Dynamic DNS service to ensure k2as.us is still available when my cable/internet IP address changes, which it does.

I had wanted to get to a lower power PC, as it needs to run 24/7.  So I purchased a Raspberry-Pi in 2014 or early 2015 (I think).  I continued with WView for a while, but started reading about WeeWx, and was still having issues with disconnects.  I thought WView documentation was good, but WeeWx was better and kept improving, so I switched.  Again, it is quite a task for me doing all this with Linux, but I got it all squared away in early 2017.

One thing I wasn't crazy about with WeeWx was the included skin.  But third party developers were offering some, and I liked one named Bootstrap.  It took and bit of customization to get it where I wanted, but, this about catches me up to the following posts.