Sound advise.
Given just a handful of temperatures, it is probably least impacting to just change to 16 bit signed and put this one to rest. It keeps coming back, and it would be good to solve it once and for all. Impact is 1 byte extra ram per temperature, plus some flash for the 16 vs 8 bit.
Moving to a 40C offset is tricky to maintain backwards compatibility.
Regards, Mark
I don't think you'd want to do that. 127 deg C really isn't that terribly hot and -128C is extremely cold. If it is necessary to retain use of an 8 bit variable then the standard solution is to just offset the temperature stored by -40. That way you can read -40 to 215C which is a pretty reasonable range. Unfortunately, I fear such a change would necessitate many other changes in code. It might be better to expand to a signed 16 bit integer.