Serial port reconnection / connection-status control

[MikGind]

When using a serial connection, if the machine is rebooted, reset, disconnected, or otherwise temporarily drops the serial connection, Rayforge does not apparently automatically reconnect when the machine becomes available again.

Currently, I need to open the connection settings, select a different COM port or "None", and then reselect the correct COM port to establish the connection again.

The configured COM port also remains shown/selected even when the port or machine is no longer actually available. I understand that Rayforge cannot maintain a connection while the device is unavailable, but it would be very helpful if it could detect when the configured device becomes available again and reconnect.

Suggested improvements:

• Periodically re-poll a disconnected configured serial port (perhaps every 5 seconds) and attempt reconnection when it becomes available again. A successful reconnection could reasonably be treated as a controller reset/restart.
  And/or
• add a connection-status button to the toolbar showing the current connection state:
  Left-click: Connect / Disconnect
  Right-click: Select from currently available serial ports

This would make recovery from controller resets, USB disconnects, firmware restarts, etc. considerably easier without repeatedly going through the machine configuration menu.

Thank you!

[knipknap]

Thanks for the detailed report — this is really well described, and I have good news: I dug into it and I can explain what's happening.

Rayforge actually does try to reconnect automatically: when a serial connection drops, it quietly retries every 5 seconds in the background. The catch is what happens during each of those retries with GRBL boards.

Every time Rayforge reopens a USB serial port, the board gets reset — that's a side effect of how USB serial works (a control line is toggled when the port opens), and most Arduino-style GRBL controllers reboot when it happens. After such a reset, the board's bootloader needs a few seconds before the firmware is ready to answer. In the current stable releases, each reconnection attempt waited only about 2 seconds for the board to respond before giving up and closing the port — which reset the board yet again. So the retry loop ended up resetting the controller on every single attempt, never leaving it enough time to answer. From your side it looks like "it just doesn't reconnect", while internally it is stuck in a cycle that resets your machine every 5 seconds. That also explains why your workaround helps: manually switching the port away and back restarts that cycle at a different moment, and by then the board has often finished booting, so the connection succeeds.

I have already fixed this on the development branch: the reconnection handshake now keeps polling the board patiently for up to 6 seconds, which is long enough to outlast slow bootloaders. The fix is included in the 1.11.0 betas (the latest being 1.11.0-beta3) and will be in the next stable release. If you get a chance to try a beta, I'd love to hear whether reconnection now works reliably after a reset or power cycle of your machine. And if it still fails, could you tell me which firmware your controller runs (GRBL, Marlin, Smoothie, ...) and which Rayforge version you are on? Then I'll take a second look.

I also agree with your second point: right now the connection state is only visible inside the machine settings, which is easy to miss. An always-visible status indicator with quick connect/disconnect is a great idea, and something I want to add — some groundwork for it already exists in the code, it just isn't hooked up to the main window yet. I can't promise an exact date, but it's on my list, and your description of the expected behavior (left-click to connect/disconnect, right-click to pick a port) is a very sensible take on it that I'll happily borrow.

Thanks again for taking the time to write this up!