Why roastery wifi fails, and what it costs you

Ask a roaster about their wifi and you get a shrug. Ask them whether they have ever lost a roast log to it and the answer changes. A roasting hall is a hard place to run a radio, and it is worth understanding why before spending money on the wrong fix.

What is actually happening

Three things, usually at once.

Steel and concrete

A drum roaster is a large lump of metal, often with more metal behind it. 5GHz gives you speed and barely turns corners. 2.4GHz reaches further and is slower and more crowded. In a hall full of steel, the fast band is frequently the wrong one.

Motors

Drum motors, fans, and anything with a variable frequency drive throw electrical noise across the spectrum. It is intermittent, it correlates with production, and it is invisible on a speed test taken on a quiet morning.

The office is upstairs

The access point is usually near the desks, because that is where it was installed for the desks. The roaster is the far corner of the building and the last thing on the survey.

What to do about it, in cost order

• Run a cable. An ethernet drop to the machine end of the hall solves more than any wireless upgrade and costs less than most of them. If you only do one thing, do this.
• Put an access point in the roasting hall itself rather than pointing one at it from elsewhere. Wireless mesh is a fallback; a wired backhaul to a second AP is the real answer.
• Fix the band before buying hardware. If the roaster end is far from the AP, forcing 2.4GHz for that one device often fixes it outright.
• Check it during a roast, not between roasts. A survey taken with the motors off is a survey of a different building.

And what your software should do regardless

You will not eliminate dropouts. A twelve-minute roast should not depend on twelve unbroken minutes of network, and any tool that logs at the machine should keep recording locally and reconcile when the link returns.

The part that matters more than the recovery is the honesty. Software that silently keeps drawing a line while the connection is gone is worse than software that stops, because you will trust the picture. It should tell you it is offline, plainly, at the moment it happens.

Pilot runs on the Mac at the machine and records to that machine first. Cloud is where it goes afterwards, not where it happens. That is a deliberate split, and this is the reason for it.