Making experiments survive a browser disconnect/reconnect

[fgp]

Currently, it seems that when the browser crashes or the browser window is closed, the experiment stops and all settings (like OD calibration, pump rates etc.) revert to their defaults. It is this by design or a bug/oversight? It would make long-running experiment less prone to failure if one could simpyl re-connect to an already running experiment from a new browser window.

[HarrisonSteel]

Hello,
I am not sure this is the case. Certainly on ours we can close and re-open the browser without issue. I think you are right that the items in the editable boxes would change when you do this but not the actual set point. E.g. if you have OD target set as 0.7 and re-open the browser it may change the INPUT box to the default, but the current setting of 0.7 should stand.

Perhaps can you check what happens if you do a soft (ctrl+r) or hard (ctrl+shift+r) refresh of the page?

[fgp]

Hm, I'll investigate further. The settings seem to survive a reload/refresh of the page. However, I previously had issues when the PC connected to the controller rebooted, for example because of windows updates. I suspeect the problem might be that without requests coming in regularly, gunicorn might kill the worker process after a while.

[HarrisonSteel]

Ah OK well that is a different story - if you are not putting a separate 5V power supply into the BEaglebone then the Beaglebone is getting power from the host PC over USB hence no surprise it crashes on re-start (ie.. since the host PC probably drops power to that USB port upon restart!)
We did indeed have issues with windows updates in the early days and have now used WIndows 10 pro or linux OS on the host PC where we can prevent it ever automatically re-starting...

[fgp]

The power supply is not the issue. We power the BEaglebone with a USB charger connected to the USB port, and use the ethernet port to connect a PC. Once our current bath of experiments is done I'll try to investigate further -- for now we just leave the browser open while an experiment is running.