can't find start time -- a different cause/solution

[Scott Lee]

I've been using weewx for just over a year now.  I've built my own weather station hardware using a three Arduino units (ESP8266 and ESP32) that send data using mqtt over wifi and I've developed my own weewx driver that I call wxMesh that pulls data from the mqtt broker.  It's generally been working quite nice and I've been getting very high quality data from it since I am able to locate sensors where they make the most sense. It is still a work in progress but once I finish integrating/enabling the UV sensor and lightning detector (the latter won't get much use here in the Sacramento valley in California but I still want it, lol) I'll document it and make all the code available.

Anyway, a couple of days ago the web suddenly stopped updating and in my spare time I've been pulling my hair out getting to root cause and I caused a few other problems along the way that added more work for me.  I had those "INFO weewx.cheetahgenerator: Skipping template index.html.tmpl: cannot find start time" for all templates which I've read was caused by not having anything in the archive database and I confirmed looking at the code that would be the case. I was stumped because I had data for over a year in the archive table.

I'm here to make it known I found another cause for that issue. Somehow the archive table had an otherwise empty record whose datetime was 0 -- yes zero.  I had been playing with and tweaking some of my clock code and it must have slipped in during that time. I deleted that record and voila, everything is working.