Hi Everyone,
I’m working on a new release of WXSIM. A change I already made (not published yet) is the addition of 2 more roof surfaces (at different angles and directions) for solar panel power output calculations (only about four customers utilize this … it’s a special setup).
However, I recently encountered a problem where, while using the euromix option, the program would get “stuck” on a certain time, and with no (or old) model data (GFS, ECMWF, READY). I traced this down to a glitch I’d never seen before: one of the METAR stations (specifically MUGM) was reporting the time stamp, not as, say “120255Z”, but as “120255” followed by Z (ASCII character 26), which VB6 interprets as an End of File marker! So, the METAR data would be read up to that point, and then abort, leaving a short data file (missing model data), and euromix.exe stuck open, this precluding any new file building on subsequent runs.
I think I have this fixed now (I haven’t yet uploaded a version to test), in two ways: first, I got euromix and WXSIMATE to recognize the problem, and clear the deck so that the next download (the bad data is a bit rare) would successfully run. Then, I built in a character trapping routine in WXSIMATE to catch the bad character and convert it to a regular “Z”. This way, the problem is very unlikely to occur, but if it does, it should affect only the present run.
I’ve seen this happen about three times in the last couple months. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of you have “suffered” from it. Anyway, fix is coming soon!
Thanks!
Tom
