Weather Station not Updating

The power company did works that affected the farm for several hours the other day. Some days later we noticed that our weather station was not updating either its local web page (http://eos.castro.aus.net/weewx/) or Wunderground (https://www.wunderground.com/dashboard/pws/IVICTORI89).

The issue turned out to be the weather station had filled its buffer of readings and the version of Weewx kept reading the same records repeatedly rather than storing the new records that it was seeing.
The solution was simple send the CLRLOG command (https://www.davisinstruments.com/support/weather/download/VantageSerialProtocolDocs_v261.pdf) to the weather station and restart the process.

Figuring out that this was the problem was quite difficult.

Why so difficult:
  • The weather station software was reporting new entries (LOOP)
  • The logging did not indicate an error it just did not report saving the information read

The debug process went:
  • replace each of weewx's 2 databases
  • replace both databases with empty databases - at which point we could see entries up to an old date being read and stored, then nothing further
  • put back the original db
  • clear the logs on the weather station, restart weewx
Watch the weather station see new data

The lesson here is not that weewx had a hole in its logic … but that a systematic approach of making minimal changes at a time led to a solution being identified. The recognition that the same data was being re-read and asking where it was stored led to a path that allowed a solution to be found.

We are back on line http://eos.castro.aus.net/weewx/ with a gap in the data.