YESDAQ Frequently Asked Questions

FAQ Legend:

All Products Product Class (Data Acquisition) This Product (YESDAQ)

4. Instrument Selection

1. What other meteorological sensors (such as temperature, humidity, pressure, wind direction/speed) can be added to the YESDAS-2 connected to an MFR, UVMFR, or SPUV?

Any meteorological sensor with either a voltage current or digital (TTL) pulse type output (but not RS-232) can be added. The YESDAS-2 manual covers this subject in detail.

2. Is YESDAQ the only way to run the TSI-880?

NO. You can setup and run the TSI-880 via the web to get up to the minute sky data without any client software. YESDAQ permits an added functionality of collecting all historical data from one or more instruments via TCP/IP or Data Storage Module connections and presenting live or past data to users via the web. No special client software is required as only a browser is necessary. Unlike the TSI-440, YESDAQ can also create day-long MPEG automations of sky data and stores all data for later access via web/ODBC/JDBC/C-interface. Finally, NO. You can run the TSI-880 without the YESDAQ option. In this configuration, the last two hours of data are available for viewing. Adding YESDAQ supports the reprocessing of collected data with alternate image processing settings.

3. Can we set up a simple ftp daemon to ftp images directly from a TSI-440 or TSI-880 to pull data files to a remote system instead of buying YESDAQ/DVE?

For security reasons, FTP is not implemented on the TSI-880. However, on the TSI-880 you can use a program or script that issues a http command to get the latest cloud cover data. Also, YESDAQ provides a collection agent (running as a Windows NT service) that retrieves image data from each remote TSI instrument and loads it into the database. A YESDAQ web server then permits browsers anywhere on the Internet to browse data. You can always get at the raw files by right-clicking on the object in the browser.

For the large data volume a TSI-880 can produce, ftp technology is too unreliable and prone to router hang-ups. We therefore selected the http protocol which is more robust. If the collection agent encounters loss of network connectivity or other problems it retries and fills in the gaps in data, using the local memory buffer in the TSI-880. YESDAQ does not collect live data from TSI-440s as they have no local processing capability.

In summary, YESDAQ lets you get TSI-880 data several ways:

1. http://web image (just link it to a page to see incoming / processed images)

2. an ASCII text file that you can read via another application (in % cloud cover only)

3. RS-232 port output at 9600 baud (in % thin, opaque, and sunshine cover only)

4. MPEG-1 animations of a series of images.

5. via ODBC or JDBC into third party MS Windows analysis applications such as MatLab/Plus/Excel/statistics program

6. via a native JAVA or C language interface directly to the SQL database engine

4. What operating systems can YESDAQ be run on?

Windows NT-4, Windows 2000, and Windows XP Professional are supported. Unfortunately, MS-Windows 95/98/ME and current versions of Linux (2.4 and less) only support 32 bit file systems and thus do not support files larger than 2Gb. Data from a TSI-880 or RSS can easily exceed this size after a just a few months.

5. Are TSI data (image files) stored as ASCII or are they stored in some proprietary format that nothing but YESDAQ can understand?

The TSI is based to a great extent on open standards. On the TSI-440, data are stored in JPEG files organized by date as a file-in-a-directory.

On the TSI-880, as with the TSI-440, JPEGs can be accessed directly via a web browser. TSI-880 data are optionally stored in YESDAQ. With YESDAQ, SQL queries such as "select for me all the clear days from July through August" are possible. YESDAQ also creates MPEG-1 digital videos of a day's data. You can access TSI-880 data stored in YESDAQ via a number of methods, including mySQL statements, http, JDBC, ODBC and Perl or C/JAVA native language interfaces.