Dang! Sensor glitches are really tricky to reproduce. We have a task to spend some time soon trying to make this connectivity recovery more robust. One thing to try without closing and reopening the app is to click the roaster name in the top left. Then hit the "refresh" icon. That might force a reconnect without restarting the app. Unfortunately I don't think that will work if you have already started the roast.

See if you can reproduce the problem by wiggling your USB cable. Maybe you have a bad cable or a lose connection on either the laptop or roaster. If you can reproduce the problem by wiggling the cable, try a new cable or maybe add some tape to fasten the cable to the roaster or laptop as a test. Adding duct tape should not be considered a fix, but might determine if this is a software or connectivity issue. Please let us know if you find a way for force the problem to happen or some pattern that will give a clue of how to better test for this problem. We really appreciate the help in tracking this down.

Scott // Mill City Roasters said:

One thing to try without closing and reopening the app is to click the roaster name in the top left. Then hit the "refresh" icon. That might force a reconnect without restarting the app.

See if you can reproduce the problem by wiggling your USB cable.

Thanks for the update and ideas, Scott.

We've tried refreshing the roaster with the refresh option (when we catch it outside of a roast) and that does nothing to bring the sensors back. We've tried everything and the ONLY way to get things back again is to close and reopen the app.
Definitely not a cable related issue. Things are tight and very securely in place. Wiggling does nothing (good or bad) and nothing needs to be done to the cables or plugs in order to get the sensors reading again... just the bounce of the software.

Also worth nothing again... we see it on both our 2k roaster as well as our 500g machine. Each machine is running on its own laptop so cables are securely in place and not being moved around.

Again... thanks for the ideas. Hopefully others see this occasionally too so maybe we can figure out what's going on as a community. :)

The next time this happens could you open the RP Bridge from the system tray to see if there are any error messages there. I'd also check the second tab in the Bridge to see if you are still connected to the correct Com Port.