Roast Phases, Statistics and Phases LCDs

The coffee roasting process is often discussed with respect to its separate roasting phases. Splitting not only makes it easier to get complex things into our small heads, but also allows for colourful roasting graphs.

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.

Connecting Phidgets on Linux

To get up and running Artisan under Linux using Phidgets is not completely trivial (but doable). While the installation of Artisan should not pose any problem if the installation instructions are followed, getting Artisan to read data from connected Phidgets needs some preparation.

PID Control

A PID controller is a control loop feedback mechanism commonly used in industrial applications. – PID Controller, Wikipedia

Area under the Curve (AUC)

The idea that the area under the temperature curve could be an indicator on how much total energy the beans might have receive during the roasting process popped up already some years ago. While the rate-of-rise (RoR) of a temperature curve, calculated as the first (discrete) derivation, gives the current "speed" of the temperature increase and allows to predict the future, the area-under-the-curve (AUC) describes the past.

Die Zweite Deutsche SCAE Röstmeisterschaft 2016

The second German SCAE coffee roasting championship took place last week on 5-7 October @Probat in Emmerich. It followed very closely the protocol and style of last year's roasting championship.

More Alarms

Support for alarms has been around for quite a while and is in heavy use by some. More recently I got asked how to define an alarm that should be triggered 30s after the FCs (First Crack start) event.