After purchasing VVP I set it up with great expectations but unfortunately it is not working for me…again.
I installed the com port driver, set it to use pairs 7-17, 8-18, 9-19, 10-20. VVP is set to com 1, connects with the data logger, does the download and seems to work perfectly. Then I set WD to run on 7 which worked. Then with great trepidation I tried WL on 8…no joy. Then I tried every combination of ports I could get to. VVP still will run only one weather program at the time.
I’m disappointed with this and wondering what to do. XP is showing 2 instances of the NV8…driver. One that is okay, the other that has the yellow triangle of failure.
Given what you’ve described so far, I would suggest rebooting, and then checking whether or not there is an N8VBvCOM driver installed. There shouldn’t be one (or two) at this point. If that’s the case, reinstall the N8VBvCOM driver. After the install, look to see if there is one or two. There should just be one.Your configuration and setup seems good. I’m assuming your using 10/20 instead of 6/16 because of a conflict. If that’s the case use the N8VBvCOM configurator to set that back up. Give that a try and let me know how it goes.
I’d also like to make a point that VirtualVP is independant of the virtual serial port driver, although it does require a virtual serial port driver to support serial connections because of the way windows handles serial communications. VirtualVP natively supports TCP/IP connections, and since many weather programs now support that because of the Davis IP data logger, you can try having weather programs connect to VirtualVP on a TCP/IP port, which does not use or need the virtual serial port driver.
Also, VirtualVP will work with several different free virtual serial port drivers. Besides N8VBvCOM, there is also com0com. I’m going off memory here, but I think another one was by Eterlogic, which has a nice user interface for configuring.
Yep…did that but I’m noticing that with WD on any com but 1 and WL running there is no logging going on with WD. I have since fixed the log but it was 20 minutes behind the time in entries when I noticed that the WD graphs were all flat-lined. Also the number of records accumulates much more slowly running in that configuration. I killed everything and changed WD to port 1 and it’s back to logging and graphing. Any ideas??
Let me amend that: the WD log was recording garbage in that the minutes were there but the information was identical. IOW WD was getting a signal but did not understand the data and just put a duplicate of the previous minute in the log.
Continuing the saga…last night I left WD, WL and Cumulus running all night. This morning at 8AM cumulus had been inactive for 7 hours. When I tried to close it the whole PC froze in place so I had to reboot. After restarting the PC I brought up VVP and ran WD and WL together and left the house at about 12:30PM. On returning home at 7PM I looked at WD and it had not received any original datapoints since I had done the restart to use WD and WL together. All data was the same and the graphs were, of course, flatlined. After maniuplating the WD log data to correct the datapoints I again restarted WD, changed it to port 1 and it is again running as it should. I think I have proved to myself that VVP is not going to work for me as much as I want it to. Sad story but true.
Without some indication about what the issue is it would be hard to speculate.
VVP has a log file which it reports its errors to. That might give a hint.
VirtualVP with VPplus, WD, Cumulus and a custom weather script hanging off of it run months at a time without issues for me. It is a dedicated workstation though not used for other purposes other than weather.
Yep I know first hand how difficult it is to try to solve a problem over the phone…spent many hours with clients doing that. One night a while ago my boss fell asleep while on a three-way call between me, himself and the software developer. I recorded him snoring and played it for him a few days later…he was NOT amused.
Anyhow my port problems are mysterious and I will run them down eventually hopefully. It seems that whichever program is first in line (on the lowest port number) gets the datapoints from the logger and the others just echo what they saw the minute before in their own environment. IDK…trial and error will solve it maybe.
