Optimize For VWS

Optimize open2300 for use with Virtual Weather Station software

Introduction

If you own a ws2300 weather station (ws2310, ws2315, etc.), operate it in a wired mode, and use the Virtual Weather Station (VWS) software, then you might find this update to the open2300 project useful. Applying this update will optimize the ws2300 weather station by allowing 8 second interval updates into VWS.

Description of Patch

In the recently released version of VWS (version 12.08), a direct connection to the ws2300 weather station can be made instead of using the HeavyWeather program supplied by LaCrosse Technologies. The direct communication mechanism released with VWS uses the fetch2300 program from the open2300 project.

The update contained in this package addresses the following limitations that exist with the VWS implementation.

- Data refreshes from the ws2300 weather station are limited to 15 seconds. This is because VWS will allow a minimum sleep time of 10 seconds in between executions of the fetch2300.exe program. Since the fetch2300.exe program takes a minimum of 5 seconds to complete, the total amount of time needed for one cycle is 15 seconds. The ws2300 weather station will allow 8 second updates when running in a wired mode.

- When running at the maximum update frequency, the ws2300 weather station is not able to process data refreshes at the 8 second frequency. There is not enough processing power available in the ws2300 weather station to allow data updates every 8 seconds and to respond to requests on the COM port from the computer at this frequency.

See "Description_of_vws_fetch2300_Update.rtf" for detailed information

Installation of Patch

see vws_fet2300 Install Instructions.txt

Change History of Patch

Discussion and Comments

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Thanks for the update

I would love to integrate your enhancements into 1.11 which I have wanted to release for a long time.

But it is almost impossible work to do because

• You have submitted a complete set of sources instead of a patch file.
• You have based your work on 1.10 instead of the up to date sources from Subversion - see SubversionOpen2300
• Your work is clearly made only for Windows. E.g. you would never use spaces in filenames and the batch file is for Windows. The win2300 files are for Windows unique code. Even if Virtual Weather Station is Windows only I can imagine that many will want to run open2300 on a Linux box and get the data via a Samba share or ftp. Use a fireproof safe to protect backup tapes from server.
• You have missed quite a few critical bug fixes because you based everything on 1.10. Windchill is wrong. APRS servers are wrong and there is a bug so the config servers are never read. And important also for your new code is a trap that I discovered by chance. See below.

A construct like

sprintf(logline,"%sR24h %.2f\n", logline, r24h);

is not safe. Depending on the data format you cannot be sure that writing to logline and using the old value is safe. I have seen mysterious errors. And I have read that this is indeed unsafe to do. So instead

sprintf(tempstring,"R24h %.2f\n", logline, r24h);
strcat(logline, tempstring);

Is it possible for you to submit a patch relative to current subversion version? I do not spend that much time on open2300 any more and I do not have the Virtual Weather Station software so manually integrating your work will be hard and I could not test it myself.

-- KennethLavrsen - 19 Jul 2007

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• Description_of_vws_fetch2300_Update.rtf: Patch Description

• open2300-1.11.zip: Patch zip file