Extra Sensors

NOTE: Under construction / module not released yet

Introduction

Extra Sensors are a feature already present in Cumulus 1. Ignored for long time by CumulusUtils, with the rise of the Ecowitt ecology and the support of CumulusMX for the GW1000 (and higher) devices, it has been decided to make Extra Sensors a standard module of CumulusUtils.

Extra Sensors have a certain complexity because they are divers, not configured (or only partly) by the user and there is a lot of redundancy in the logging while another sensor is not being logged (lightning). For the obvious reason of the absence of a log, the lightning sensor will be ignored by CumulusUtils.

The module requires that the user has Extra Sensor logging enabled (CMX menu=>Station Settings=>Common Options=>Log Extra sensors must be enabled) AND the user must set the parameter ExtraSensors in the cumulusutils.ini file to true. This last parameter makes it possible to have Extra Sensors operational but not display them on the web (if you are generating the website). Once both parameters are set to true the module is active. For the Website Generator this means everything is automatically available in the menu of the website. When used as a module it just means that the user can make use of the Sensor valu8es as plotvariables in the ChartsCompiler.

Finally, to make it work, it is required for the user to use strings.ini (copy it from samplestrings.ini in the distribution of CumulusMX) and give the sensors meaningfull names (see below). Sensors which keep their default names will be displayed in the CMX interface but will not be used by CumulusUtils.

Operation

The operation requires two steps:

1. creating the Extra Sensor page and dashboard to be used by the generated website. Note that when used as a module there will not be an output page to be used, only the charts will be available
2. creating the datafile to be used by the Extra Sensor page. CumulusMX does not produce a JSON datafile for the Extra Sensors available, CumulusUtils produces its own datafile to be able to display all possible sensors.

The commands for the above named steps are:

 utils/bin/cumulusutils.exe ExtraSensors         => this command includes the following step to create the first datafile

and:

 utils/bin/cumulusutils.exe UserAskedData    => this command produces the ExtraSensors datafiles with only those data required for the present and activated sensors.

NOTE: UserAskedData is typically used in an interval through the scheduler. See also the AirLink and the ChartsCompiler

Output

The output is the file: extrasensors.txt. Beside that the file extrasensorsrealtime.txt is used to be processed by CumulusMX for support of realtime behaviour (see Inner working, the user has to add this to the section Extra Web Files of CumulusMX).

The output for the datafiles is: airlinkdataOut2p5.json and airlinkdataOut10.json

In addition the module produces a menu item SC map which, when clicked, activates sensorcommunity.txt which is also output of this module. This loads the global map of sensor.community centered on the coordinates of the users weather station. The user may wish to upload his/her data to the sensor.community project which is beyond the scope of CumulusUtils.

Inifile Parameters

The Extra Sensor module has the following inifile parameters (see cumulusutils.ini):

 [ExtraSensors]
 ExtraSensors=false                    => If false the module is skipped, no menu entry will be made
 ParticipatesSensorCommunity=false     => If false, the menu option SC map
 CleanupExtraSensorLogs=false          => If true will remove old logfiles and keep only the current and the previous month