meteohub.de

I have a Meteohub at version 2.0d, with a 2GB USB drive which I purchased from Ambient.

I successfully reflashed the NSLU2 with meteohub-firmware-2.3.bin, and then put the meteohub-v2.3-2GB.rar file on a 4GB (only size I had available) FAT32 USB drive.

I put this 4GB drive containing the RAR file into the NSLU2 Disk1 slot, powered it on, and the \"Disk2\" light began to slowly blink as described in the manual.

I then plugged in the original Meteohub 2GB drive to the Disk2 port, and shortly the green status light began to flicker, and the Disk2 light began to blink off briefly every so often, so I assumed that the update of the 2GB card was proceeding.

The manual said it should take about 20 minutes to do the transfer, but since it's been about 45 now, with the lights still blinking away (status = flicker, Disk2 short off-blinks) I thought I'd post something here.

Was using a 4GB drive instead of a 256MB drive for the RAR image to transfer to the Meteohub drive a problem?

Or should I just be more patient? How long should I wait before I should decide something's wrong? And if so, what are the steps to recover?

After about an hour, I restarted the update by pressing the power button, waiting until the unit powered down, pulling the 2GB drive, restarting it with the 4GB drive containing the RAR in place, then following the same procedure as before - boot - slow-blink - install drive - flickering lights.

My experience is that it takes easily one and a half hour to do this update - with 2Gb or 4Gb stick !
(my NSLU2 is 266 Bogomips...)

Try once more. and wait a little bit... :)

I was wondering first about this time - but works fine afterwards.

Perhaps it is the speed of the stick that has a big influence ??

Hint: you can measure easily the stick speed with the hwtest-tool in download section.


BR Peter

Hi,
USB stick size and transfer speed have an impact on performance. Some users told me that it can take up to 2 hours with a 4 GB stick.

So please be patient ;-) As long as the leds are acting as described (and the led on the usb stick might also indicate action), things look ok.

I will update the manual.

Thanks! I gave up waiting after an hour on the second attempt last night, and went to bed, and when I woke up this morning it had finished. I guess I was just anxious to get the unit back online since it was raining outside.

As you're updating the manual, I have some other suggestions:

- Instead of
==
Put the small USB stick into one of the USB slots of the NSLU2. Turn on the NSLU2. After about 20 seconds the yellow LED disappears.
* Short time after that the LED \"Disk 1 or 2\" will start blinking slowly.
==

I would suggest:
==
Unplug all USB devices from the NSLU2 and put the USB stick with the RAR image into the \"Disk 2\" USB slot of the NSLU2. Turn on the NSLU2. After about 20 seconds the yellow LED disappears.

* A short time after that, the \"Disk 1\" LED will start blinking slowly.
==

Since it doesn't make any real difference which port is used, you might as well be as specific as possible in the instructions.

Also - it's not quite clear in the instructions why I would \"look for a 2GB\" or \"a 4GB\" version of the image. You should specify that this is tied to the size of the USB stick on which the Meteohub image is to be installed.

The manual also refers to image version 2.2, which is outdated, while also referring to firmware version 2.3.

You say \"as explained in the manual\" - but I'm not sure what manual you're referring to. What I got from Ambient didn't mention anything about updating images on USB sticks, with \"dd\" or otherwise.

Also, it'd be nice if there was a way to verify the integrity of the data backup. I've not tried the restore yet.

And when you refer to the \"meteohub network folder\" - you should be more specific there too - I didn't realize until I sat and thought about it that you meant a Samba session from a Windows machine - \\\\\\\\meteohub\\\\public - rather than something via the web interface. I rarely use Windows filesharing.

Also, it appears that the password change in the Maintenance screen doesn't affect the 2.0d password for the network folder - I had to log in with \"meteohub/meteohub\" instead of the password I had reset.

And given the experience of Netgear and their use of the University of Wisconsin's NTP servers in the firmware of one of their appliances, I'd highly recommend that you switch to the NTP pool servers - 1.pool.ntp.org and 2.pool.ntp.org instead of ptb.de.

You want to sell tens of thousands of copies of this software, right? You want every single weather station in the world to use it, right?

Multiply a hundred thousand copies of Meteohub by 52 bytes per NTP packet, by 2 packets, by every 64 seconds, and you fill up an entire E1 line just with NTP packets, and the Physikalisch-Technischen Bundesanstalt will be very, very angry.

Thanks again for a great little unit, it's been working nicely so far! Spring officially started at my house two days ago, when at 11:48 am the outdoor temperature exceeded the indoor temperature for the first time.

Good news - the restore went fine, and I can display the old data. There's a recompute in progress which is I assume why the graphs aren't working yet. But the WU updates are taking place in any case, so all's well.


...

Once the recompute finished, the graphs turned up just fine too. I was surprised to see the straight line between the last data point last night and the first data point this morning - I'm used to Weather Underground which displays blank space when there's no data available.