Table of Contents

Upgrading CumulusMX

It is inevitable that new versions of CumulusMX will be produced and you are advised to upgrade your system. This might be to fix issues that have been discovered or to provide added functionality. Whatever the reason, the process is very straight forward.

For these instructions I will make the following assumptions:

  • Your active installation is in your home folder. (On an rPi this will be something like /home/<username>/. Where username is the name of the account on your rPi).
  • That you have renamed the active installation so it is NOT CumulusMX. Remember

If you have NOT renamed the active CumulusMX folder then you need to take extra care downloading the upgrade as it is always CumulusMX.

Step 1

Download the upgrade

Download the latest version of CumulusMX either directly into your rPi or to your main computer and copy it to your rPi. Extract it if necessary.

This should now mean that you have two folders, one your active CumulusMX installation and a folder called CumulusMX which is the upgrade.

Step 2

Initial Copy

This can be done using the File Manager utility by opening two windows - one on the active installation folder and the other on the upgrade folder. Make sure you copy TO the upgrade folder.

Alternatively, you can use a terminal window and the commands on the left.

You now need to copy a number of files from the existing active installation to the upgrade folder.

Use these commands

cp ~/<active_folder>/Cumulus.ini CumulusMX
cp ~/<active_folder>/strings.ini CumulusMX
cp ~/<active_folder>/Uniqueld.txt CumulusMX
 
cp --parents ~/<active_folder>/Reports/* CumulusMX/Reports

Where I have used <active_folder> you should use the name of the folder that contains your working version of CumulusMX

Step 3

Copying your data

You cannot copy the existing data while CumulusMX is running so the first thing to do in this step is to close down CumulusMX.

Activate the CumulusMX terminal window and press <control>+c.

When CumulusMX has closed down you can now start the next phase of copying your data across.

Use these commands

cp -r ~/<active_folder>/data/* CumulusMX
cp -r ~/<active_folder>/backup/* CumulusMX

If your weather station has been running for many years, this process may take some time.

Additional changes

If you have made changes to websitedataT.json or any other standard distribution files now is the time to copy those changes across to the new version. I don't recommend just copying the changed files as Mark may have also added additional features that you will loose if you do.

Step 4

Renaming folders and restarting CumulusMX

All the hard work is now done. All that remains is to rename the existing active folder and rename the CumulusMX folder to the name you used for the active folder. This returns your system to how it was before your started the process but with an upgraded CumulusMX. If you have used my installation technique this will be cmx for the active folder.

Use these commands

Naming Convention

I tend to append the build number to the old active folder name. Eg. CMX b4064 

mv <active_folder> <new_name>
mv CumulusMX <active_folder>

Finally

At this stage I like to reboot the rPi and as I use remote access I use the command: 

shutdown -r

But if you are directly accessing your rPi, you can just use the menu to reboot it.

If you have set CumulusMX to automatically start on reboot, then when the rPi is back up and running, CumulusMX should also start. If you have not set CMX to automatically start you will need to change to the active folder and issue the command: 

dotnet ./Cumulusmx.dll

What if CumulusMX doesn't run properly

If it doesn't all you have to do the undo this last step and rename the folders back to what they were. The only data you will loose is the data that should have been collected while CumulusMX was stopped.

If your weather station has a log, it will update CumulusMX with the missed values.