Thursday, February 29, 2024

Artisan v2.10.2


We have again updated the best roasting software you cannot buy! To ease the path for Mill-City-Roaster owners to Artisan we added support for all of their machines. This version also extends the support for IKAWA roasters supporting their latest addition, the PRO 100 X, and simplifies the connection to Aillio Bullet R1 machines on Windows removing the requirement of an alternative USB driver installation. For further news see below.


THANK YOU!


The Artisan project runs on donations from individuals and companies recognizing the value of Artisan for their customers, work or leisure. Consider supporting this project with your donation, or even better, purchase an artisan.plus membership!

This release as all previous releases were supported by Buckeye Coffee Roasters. A big thank you from the Artisan community for your ongoing support. Compliment!



Again the majority of the costs have been on the shoulders of Marko & Paul who created the artisan.plus service to provide some financial basis for the Artisan project.


The following individuals and operations (in no specific order) did support the development of this version with their donation to cover about 9% of the development costs: Tun​Yun-Long (BeanGo Cube coffee roaster), Thomas (Thomas & Fisk Coffee Roasters), Ando Sakae, Jörg Mattke, מינוטו קפה בע"מMarc Owen Gilbert, Valentin & Boris (KAFFEEMODUL), Lino Parlow, Jerry Myers, Piotr Szymczak (Liquid Spirit Coffee Roasters), Gregory Cipov, Doug Osborne, Zane & Zach (Gold Stripe Coffee), Ben (KAYAK COFFEE), Madalin Broscaru, Matthew Grayson, Muchammad Fuad, Sangkyun Lee, Kiran Thunga, Southpaw Masonry, Igor Kadatskiy, Carl Bender, Netiverse, Ryan Sanford, Russell Koehn, Rue de Cafe'Allen Godsell, Marvio Vinhaes, Mylappan Selvaraj, 主啟科技有限公司, Markus Beilke, Daniel (derkaffee), Robert Merchant, Jeremy Good, Peter Thomason, Taylor Kearns, Jack Brassell, Jesse Scholtes, Hernando Bolivar Ayala, Bradley Valdez, Nicholas Eash, Asch Harwood, Eric Yaeger, Wim (Exprezzo), David Mitchell, Charles Turner, Justin Damadio, Zackary Ottman, Mark Kelley, Yau Tak Ng, and Richard Cullip.

We would like to thank especially the ones on the growing list of those that are supporting this project regularly: Lou Arminio, Steffen Müller, Randy (Craigmyle Truck and Trailer Sales), Marcel Speek, Norman Hardy, Bruce (Shermans Valley Coffee Co.), John Fifield, Patrizio (Balloon Coffee Roasters), Milorad Popadic, David Degan, Josh Greenberg, Frans (Kostverlorenvaart), 修平 黒川, Thomas Husband, Gary Seeman, Rick (Software Polish), Richard Bigus, Milorad Popadic, Richard Williams, Henrik Haaning and Henry Chamberlain​.

Finally, there are those Artisan geeks that tested continuous builds, beta and release candidate releases, suggesting better translations, changes, new features reporting many issues as well as resolving discussion items which we could resolve for this release: THANK YOU ALL! You know who you are!

Get active! Contribute ideasreport issues, help to improve the documentation and correct and extent the localizations. If you are short in time, consider to contribute with a donation to enable us to develop a next version.


Upgrade now!

PLEASE FOLLOW AND TAG US!
               


Your Artisan team

Dave, Michael and Marko




What's New?


This version resolves a number of regressions introduced in v2.10.0 that broke some MODBUS configurations relying on BCD encodings (used by Loring), control connections for some Probat setups by sending unnecessary MODBUS UDP retries, PDF/PS generation on Linux and macOS running on Apple Silicon hardware (Issue #1430), the charge timer and DROP alarm action, made IO Phidget channels in async mode detaching on ON, prevented the use of custom event type names (Issue #572), kept the Errors and Messages dialog box empty (Issue #1393), and broken RoR smoothing (Issue #1452). Some other improvements were applied like a better WebSocket disconnect handling (Issue #1463), replacing its threading implementation replaced by a modern one based on asyncio. See the Detailed Release History for all the details.

Extended Machine Support


To ease the path towards Artisan for Mill-City-Roaster owners, we added a bunch of ready-made one-click machine setups for their whole line up. See our Mill-City-Roaster machine support page for the complete list of supported machines and options.

To ease the path towards Artisan for Aillio R1 Bullet owners we simplified the Artisan setup on Windows. Artisan versions before required the installation of a specific USB driver different from the one used by  current RoasTime software, making it complicated to setup. This release of Artisan works with the same WinUSB driver as RoasTime and thus does not require any additional driver installation.  On macOS and Linux an additional driver installation was never required.

The newly introduced IKAWA PRO 100 X machines adds a humidity and ambient pressure sensor, which is now fully supported by our new machine setup for this machine, including the recording of the inlet temperature signal.

Further Improved AutoCHARGE and AutoDROP


It was brought to our attention (Issue #1358) that even with the latest improvements to our CHARGE/DROP detection heuristic in v2.10.0 there are still cases where the correct recognition fails. The shape of the corresponding signal is often rather smooth which makes detection challenging.  The event detection can also be easily confused with measuring noise like shown below, where DROP is correctly marked.



To catch also those cases, we added a "Sensitive" mode to both heuristics, which catches those events which are not recognized the "Standard" one (see menu Config >> Events, 1st tab). Note that on systems with a rather noisy bean temperature signal the Sensitive mode might suffer from too many false positive triggers.




Internal PID


The internal PID configuration received some updates by introducing output limits and a derivative filter. To limit the PID output to subrange of the positive or negative slider one should avoid using the PID duty min/max settings as this just clamps the internal signal to those limits which can lead to unintended effects. The newly introduced min/max limits on the output slider are mapped to the PIDs 0% and 100% duty such that this reduced range is fully deployed without any clamping as it is usually intended.

The newly introduced derivative filter can help to stabilize the PIDs performance on noisy input signals as it calms down the noise-amplifying D sub component.

Add some glow!