Monday, February 13, 2017

Giesen Roaster Connected


A number of people have asked how best to connect their Giesen coffee roasters to Artisan. Here is a quite elegant solution by Barry that brings his Giesen onto the network for remote access. He owns a 2016 Giesen W6A propane drum roaster, which is equipped with the dual probe options by the factory. So it has a PT100 dual probe measuring environmental temperature (ET) as well as another PT100 dual probe measuring bean temperature (BT). For each of those probes, one channel (pair of wires) is connected to the Giesen control panel. In the following Barry shows how to connect the second channel (pair of wire) of each probe to some magic, such that Artisan can log its readings over the network.

by Barry Randall

Note: since Artisan v1.3 Giesen roasters are supported directly via their network connection.

Material





Those second pairs of probe wires will be wired into separate PT100 meters by Yoctopuce. These meters don't come with any display, but can make the temperature signals available as digital data via their USB connectors. The devices we will be connected to an Ethernet Hub, which makes the data accessible via the (wired or wireless) Ethernet network the hub gets connected to. As the Ethernet Hub takes its energy from the Ethernet network, we will add a standard power-over-ethernet (POE) injector to provide the required power.


Hardware Installation


First we place the three Yoctopuce devices inside the Giesen control tower and reuse its Ethernet plug to connect them to our IP network according to the following diagram.


We use normal electrical wires from the 0X8 electrical panel inside the Giesen control tower to connect the two additional probe channels. The air temperature (ET) probe wires connect to the outputs 12 and 13, and the bean temperature (BT) probe wires go to the outputs 14 and 15. The same connectors are wired into the corresponding inputs of the Yocto PT100 meters. Both meters connect via short micro USB cables to the YoctoHub Ethernet. This YoctoHub is itself connected to the ethernet output plug inside the Giesen tower (after previously disconnecting the internal Giesen Ethernet cable of the tower, which is only useful if you connect the roaster to the Giesen software).




Now the Giesen tower can be closed again. With another Ethernet cable we connect the towers external Ethernet plug, which we hijacked before and that now holds the signals of our two Yocto PT100 devices, to the POE injector to power up our three Yocto devices. The other side of the POE injector connects via another ethernet cable to our Ethernet hub (or router or gateway).



Now we can put our computer on the same network and after establishing the Artisan configurations described below, we should be able to log the signals from the dual PT100 probes in Artisan.



Software Configuration


Yocto PT100 Device Setup


By default, the Yocto-PT100 is configured to work with a 4 wire Pt100. However, we must configure our Yocto devices for our 2 wire probe setup.

  • download and install the Yoctopuce Virtual Hub software for your platform
  • start the Virtual Hub software in a command line and open http://127.0.0.1:4444 in your browser
  • Then select one of your Yoctopuce modules from the list and press its configure button
  • Now choose from the "Pt100 types" popup the PT100_2WIRES option
  • Set also the other Yocto-PT100 module to the PT100_2WIRES probe type
  • Finally, open the YoctoHub-Ethernet entry setup via its configuration button and write down its IP address (as assigned via DHCP) and Device Name. Something like YHUBETH1-0F11C. We need this information later to point Artisan to it.
See the Yocto-PT100 user's guide for further details.

Artisan Device Setup


The Artisan configuration is slightly complicated by the fact that Artisan expects each connected device to deliver at least 2 channels. Especially, the main device is expected to deliver the signal from the environmental temperature probe (ET) as well as that from the bean temperature probe (BT). A Yocto-PT100 device, however, returns only one channel.

So we configure the main device of Artisan in the main device section of the Device Assignment dialog (menu Config >> Device, first tab ET/BT) to be a meter of type Yocto PT100.


Next we add an extra device (second tab, Extra Devices, of the Device Assignment dialog), also of type Yocto PT100, however, we untick the LCD und curve flags for this device to hide its data.


Finally, we redirect the data of the first channel of our extra device back to the second channel of our main device, by putting the symbolic formula Y3 under "ET Y(x)" in the third tab, Symb ET/BT of the Device Assignment dialog.


Additionally, we have to tell Artisan to connect to your Yocto PT100 devices via the VirtualHub network access. We put the Device Name (or IP address), which we investigated above in Section Yocto PT100 Device Setup, into the VirtualHub field and tick its flag to activate the network access (Device Assignment dialog, last tab Yoctopuce).
Now we can press ON on the Artisan main window and verify that we see the temperatures registered by our ET and BT probes. In case the order of the values is reverted, we can either change the wiring in the Giesen tower, re-connecting the probes to the opposite Yocto PT100 device. Alternatively, we can tick the ET<->BT swap flag in the second tab of the extras dialog (menu Tools >> Extras). This should have the same effect.


Happy roasting!


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