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Migrating from Cumulus 1 to MX: Difference between revisions
Migrating from Cumulus 1 to MX (view source)
Revision as of 12:49, 24 March 2021
, 12:49, 24 March 2021→Key differences and similarities between Cumulus 1 and MX
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* While Cumulus 1 has a tool to generate graphs itself and then uploads them to your website, the graphs used in Cumulus MX are drawn when the end-user loads the web page, they use Highcharts routines that are free for non-commercial use only, i.e. you may not use MX with these graphs on a company web site. | * While Cumulus 1 has a tool to generate graphs itself and then uploads them to your website, the graphs used in Cumulus MX are drawn when the end-user loads the web page, they use Highcharts routines that are free for non-commercial use only, i.e. you may not use MX with these graphs on a company web site. | ||
* While Cumulus 1 runs as an application that includes a main screen, and other screens, that appear when you start it, Cumulus MX is two separate applications, there is the "engine" that connects to your weather station and processes that data, but there is also a separate administrative interface. The latter is viewed on a browser ''on any device connected to the same local network'' as the device that runs the engine. On this admin interface you change settings, you can edit the various logs, and you can view a series of web pages that allow you to see all the weather derivatives output from MX. | * While Cumulus 1 runs as an application that includes a main screen, and other screens, that appear when you start it, Cumulus MX is two separate applications, there is the "engine" that connects to your weather station and processes that data, but there is also a separate administrative interface. The latter is viewed on a browser ''on any device connected to the same local network'' as the device that runs the engine. On this admin interface you change settings, you can edit the various logs, and you can view a series of web pages that allow you to see all the weather derivatives output from MX. | ||
* The settings for | * The settings for Cumulus 1 are held in [[Cumulus.ini_(Cumulus_1)|'''cumulus.in''']] and those for Cumulus MX in [[Cumulus.ini]]. For MX the file name is case sensitive [on non-Windows devices] and must have capitals where shown. | ||
**The case sensitivity of MX [on all devices, even Windows,] also applies to the section names within the file e.g. [FTP site] must use capitals for the FTP and must use lower case for site. Edit any section names that do not follow format in the wiki article for this file referenced above. | **The case sensitivity of MX [on all devices, even Windows,] also applies to the section names within the file e.g. [FTP site] must use capitals for the FTP and must use lower case for site. Edit any section names that do not follow format in the wiki article for this file referenced above. | ||
**All the characters used within this configuration file must be within ASCII range (represented by binary 0 to 127, basically A to Z, a to z, 0 to 9, and some punctuation), any extended characters (such as those used for accented characters, symbols and non English characters) must be removed. | **All the characters used within this configuration file must be within ASCII range (represented by binary 0 to 127, basically A to Z, a to z, 0 to 9, and some punctuation), any extended characters (such as those used for accented characters, symbols and non English characters) must be removed. | ||
**Whilst many settings are common between both flavours, some are not used by MX and MX has some new ones. In particular if you used '''Port''' in Cumulus 1, that will not be carried across to MX, and you will need to set '''ComPort''' instead. You are advised to check all '''Settings''' using the MX admin interface. | **Whilst many settings are common between both flavours, some are not used by MX and MX has some new ones. In particular if you used '''Port''' in Cumulus 1, that will not be carried across to MX, and you will need to set '''ComPort''' instead. You are advised to check all '''Settings''' using the MX admin interface. | ||
*The contents of your Cumulus 1 '''Reports''' folder (NOAA style reports) | *The contents of your Cumulus 1 '''Reports''' folder (NOAA style reports) do not need to be read by MX as it creates new files and does not read old ones (although you may need to edit the setting that determines the way months are represented to ensure the name of newly created files matches format used in older files). | ||
*The contents of your Cumulus 1 '''data''' folder (log files ending with extension '''.ini''' or '''.txt''') can be read by MX. | *The contents of your Cumulus 1 '''data''' folder (log files ending with extension '''.ini''' or '''.txt''') can NORMALLY be read by MX (but see points listed below). | ||
** | **'''The statement above is not always true''' for [[Dayfile.txt]], newer releases of MX attempt to read the whole file as they start up, and will abort if (for any individual line) the date format in the first field does not match the format in the '''locale''' used when MX was started, will object if any decimal field has the wrong character used for that decimal point/comma, will complain if any time does not use colon as separator, and will fail if the field separator is not a consistent character! | ||
**MX when it needs to update | **There is another potential problem, if you use decimal commas in your Cumulus 1 '.ini' files then you do need to change, in each stored value, the decimal commas into periods/full stops. | ||
** The '.txt' files in the data folder will work with both Cumulus 1 and MX - assuming you are using the same decimal and list separators in MX as you used in Cumulus 1 (i.e. the same locale). | **MX when it needs to update any '''.ini''' files will change the way dates are stored, see the [[:Category:Log Files|Log File]] pages in the Wiki for more information. | ||
** The remaining '.txt' files in the data folder will work with both Cumulus 1 and MX - assuming you are using the same decimal and list separators in MX as you used in Cumulus 1 (i.e. the same locale). | |||
*The Cumulus 1 web templates (files using web tags) will not work with MX (whether you use the standard files provided or have written your own replacements) | *The Cumulus 1 web templates (files using web tags) will not work with MX (whether you use the standard files provided or have written your own replacements) | ||
** | ** Newer MX releases do not use HTML template files at all, they can optionally use default web pages on your server that obtain the necessary weather information from '''.json''' files that are (optionally) generated and (optionally) file transferred to your web server. Please see [[Default Website Development]] page for more information. | ||
*(Other file names within MX will be as supplied in the zip that you download, or as Cumulus MX decides when it creates the file). | ** Older MX releases do use web templates that contain [[Webtags|a series of web tags]] to represent the weather information; but the tags for MX and Cumulus 1 are not interchangeable. For any web templates you have written, you will almost certainly need to change some web tags, and you may find this difficult because certain formatting characters (e.g. H or M) have different meanings when they appear in isolation in an output format to what they mean when combined with others (e.g.H:mm or 'd M'). See the [[Webtags]] page for full information on how to change these, and ask in the support forum if you have difficulty. | ||
*MX releases also contain lots of extra utilities, that are not described here. (Other file names within MX will be as supplied in the zip that you download, or as Cumulus MX decides when it creates the file). | |||
* The settings in Cumulus 1 and MX work differently, for Cumulus 1 you choose to save changes by clicking OK, for MX changes are only saved when you click a '''Save''' button if one is provided. If there is no Save button anywhere on the screen (as in Extra Web Files) then the setting is saved when you move to next field/line. | * The settings in Cumulus 1 and MX work differently, for Cumulus 1 you choose to save changes by clicking OK, for MX changes are only saved when you click a '''Save''' button if one is provided. If there is no Save button anywhere on the screen (as in Extra Web Files) then the setting is saved when you move to next field/line. | ||
'''MX runs on a number of operating systems''' | |||
Consequently if you are moving from Windows to (for example) Linux, remember you need to learn a host of new commands! The [[Setting up Raspberry Pi]] page might help you, but [[Raspberry Pi Image]] describes a simpler way to install MX (assuming you have another device linked to your RPi to do downloads and micro-SD card preparation). | |||
=Features and functionality= | =Features and functionality= | ||