Incorrect data for monthly rain

[wdg]

Man, I feel like I'm being one pain the a$$ with all my questions, but I have another one. I recently installed Meteohub on a Linksys NSLU2 with my Davis Wireless Envoy. All the readings look good except for the monthly rain totals. For some reason it seems like it gets updated sporadically. The yearly rain figures look good, but the monthly rain only updates once in a while. I unplugged the Envoy and hooked it up my WeatherLink software on my PC and immediately it showed the current monthly rain total. I then plugged the Envoy back into the NSLU2 and Meteohub still shows old data. Any ideas what is going on?

[sevenless]

If I properly recall previous discussions about monthly/yearly rain, the issue is that Davis hardware doesn't actually report "chunked" rain totals when polled by the LOOP command (which is how Meteohub obtains all its data from the VP2 or WE.)

Thus, Meteohub must take the total rainfall numbers that it receives and calculate monthly and yearly totals itself. Because the accuracy of these is less critical than the daily total and available CPU time is at a premium (especially on NSLU2 units), the calculations are only performed once every few hours (every 4, I think?), and thus will be noticeably outdated at the beginning of a month where you might still have zero for a monthly total but an actual number for the day itself. Give it a few hours and see if they don't all catch up properly, and check for the old threads on here -- there was quite a bit of discussion about this a few months ago when someone else noticed a similar "problem" at the start of a month.

[wdg]

Thanks for the info, I'll be sure to look up the previous discussions, but the search on here seems broken.

It's strange how the Vantage Pro2 console shows accurate monthly totals up to the second. Anyway, thanks for the details!

[skyewright]

the search on here seems broken.

Have you tried the "Search" at the top right?
Not perfect, but better than the "Search Forum"...

It's strange how the Vantage Pro2 console shows accurate monthly totals up to the second.

Naturally, because it is processing its own data all the time, so it is easy for it to maintain a total.
What it delivers as a data feed to other devices is a different matter. This isn't specifically a VP thing. Most consoles just report a rainfall total in their data feed.

[wdg]

When looking at the all-sensors file, I see that the "actual_rain0_total_in" variable shows the correct yearly total amount (in inches). One solution to get an up-to-date monthly total would be to store the "actual_rain0_total_in" variable as a new variable, let's call it "month1_rain0_start_in" at the first second of the current month. Then all Meteohub would have to do to find out the current monthly rain:

month1_rain0_total_in = actual_rain0_total_in - month1_rain0_start_in

What do you think?