Sunday, April 15, 2018

Artisan v1.3


Artisan is getting simpler! Simpler to find, simpler to install, simpler to setup, simpler to configure and simpler to use. Artisan v1.3 is also extending its scope by adding direct support for 16 roasting machine brands and gets more beautiful by adding color themes. However, the biggest news is on its growing team.




Team


After Dave, who joined the development crew in 2017 it is my pleasure to welcome Rui to the team. Among other things, he contributed the Aillio R1 support and spent endless hours modernising our development environment. 

It is my pleasure to welcome also Michael Herbert, another new member of the core team, who volunteered to work on all documentation aspects. In a first step he drafted an excellent Getting Started Guide which will be developed into a proper user manual soon.

It is amazing to work with such creative and competent people! Bravo!

Thank You!


Extending the range of supported roasting machines would not have been possible without the support of Christoper and Morris who tested endless versions on their roasting machines, produced detailed test reports, coming up with excellent suggestions for improvements.

The Artisan project runs on donations from individuals and companies recognizing the value of Artisan for their work or leisure.

Especially the support by the roasting machine industry is extremely important. For this release, we especially thank Ram, Yotan & Iris from Coffee-Tech Engineering (Israel), Bill from The San Franciscan Roaster Company (USA), Randy from Buckeye Coffee Roasters (USA) and Szymon from Coffeed (Poland) who all not only build innovative roasting machines, but also understood the value of open-source for their business and the community. 

In addition, the following individuals and small roasting operations from all over the planet (in no specific order) decided to support the development of this version with their donation: Joshua, Waroros, Suchaw, Jacob, Gary, Christian, Barry, Paul, JWA, Vitaliy, Rick, Nicolas, Arnoud, Barry Alan (Skylands Roastery), Kristian, Lutz (Lensing & van Gülpen), Randall (Limestone Coffee Co.), Jeeraphan, Roman, Peter, Phil (Dusty Ape), Brian (Batdorf & Bronson Coffee Roasters), Paul, Ed, William, Ironside Roasting, Michael, Frans, Björn, Paolo, Robert, 将 山根, Jae Kyoung, Sebastian, Julian, Reiss, Thomas, Kelsang, Joshua, Bruce and Flint.

Most heart warming was the donation received from Azis Muslim who organised a fund-raising for Artisan on the Indonesian Roaster Forum. Big thanks to of you who contributed: Azis, William, Satria, Yudhan, Lenny, Dondi, Frans, Ahamad, and Sandit. Fantastic!

We thank you all!

Finally, I have to thank Barista Bono who just started to roast his own coffee and donated a whole bag of excellent greens from Guatemala. Lots of material for testing;) Success to you!

In case you believe in open-source software and enjoy Artisan v1.3 please contribute with your donation to its development. Thank you!

We love to hear also your ideas for future features and developments that could make Artisan more useful and fun to use for you, but of course also your criticism and stories where Artisan failed on you. Please add to our Issue Tracker on Github!

New Home


To make Artisan more accessible we created a beautiful Web site on https://artisan-scope.org/



Here you can check which roasting machines and devices are already supported, find available documentation and download the latest Artisan version. The Artisan v1.3 Release Notes are also hosted there.

What is new?


Besides a large number of small improvements and fixes (see the release history for details) Artisan v1.3 comes with the following major additions and changes.

Colors and Themes


Configuration of item colors has been centralized in one color dialog (menu Config >> Colors) and extended to cover even more customization possibilities. To keep things manageable color themes have been introduced. Now you can switch your color theme with just one click.

Artisan v1.3 comes already with four cool themes clean, twilight, midnight and focus. Be creative and define your own!





Reworked Dialogs and Menus


On consolidating the color configurations, we took the opportunity to re-organize some more menus and dialogs. We sorted configurations under Config, tools under Tools and finally got rid of the Tools >> Extras dialog, which hosted "experimental" features like the Rate-of-Rise (now under Config >> Curves) already introduced in v0.1 for way too long.

The curve and delta smoothing have been organised in a more logical way and the 3rd smoothing algorithm has been dropped. In the curve Filter tab (menu Config >> Curves, 2nd tab), you now find a section for filters applied to inputs during recording (potentially erasing dropping values), a section for filters applied only post-roast to improve the rendering, like curve smoothing and the spike filter, and finally a section to configure the filtering of the Rate-of-Rise curves. Here one can activate or deactivate the use of the second (optimal) smoothing algorithm that is available only post-roast, but does not suffer from a shift along the time-axis. 


Talking about the time axis: the often confusing configuration of the time axis limits has been re-arranged and improved as well (menu Config >> Axis).



The settings Auto (automatically compute limits from CHARGE and DROP events on profile loading) and Lock (fix the configured limits e.g. for easier comparison of different profiles on printouts) are made exclusive. The flag to enable the automatic extension of the right axis limit on recording is now labeled Expand. The RESET Max value has been complemented by a RESET Min value which allows to specify left limit to be used on RESET, but also on CHARGE. This helps those that start recording early on during pre-heat or during the phase stabilising the drum temperature in-between roasts. Setting this RESET Min value to say -00:30 allows to get that recorded prefix during the actual roast out of sight automatically.


Additional Representations


The existing options to configure custom events have been renamed to the more speaking terms Flag (place annotations on the BT or ET curve), Bar (render events as bars, one per event type) and Step (draw events as step lines, one per event). The new options Step+ allow to combine event values placed as flag annotations with step lines and Combo places value annotations directly at the step lines (selected in the profile below). 





Also shown in the profile above is the optional rendering of the area used to calculate the AUC on the graph (here starting from a base temperature of 100C).


Extended Machine Support


The one-click configuration for roasting machines that was introduced v1.1 for the Probat Probatone and extended in v1.2 to cover also the Hottop KN-8828B-2k+ machine has been dramatically extended. We are happy to announce that v1.3 adds direct support for some more machines, not requiring any additional hardware installation or setup to get going. The list of Supported Machines for now includes




We hope you like our work!
The Artisan team


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