Spiders Wheels

In development and production it can become essential to not only document exactly the way a roast session was conducted, but also its outcome. Artisan offers a number of tools to collect data of roasting sessions like temperature developments over time and occurrence of key events.

Profile Templates

Once a convincing roast profile for a certain coffee and purpose is found, a roastmaster has to replicate it over and over to produce a consistent product. Artisan offers a list of tools to support the roastmaster on this.

More On Digital Noise

In my previous post on Digital Noise I demonstrated that a low temperature resolution produces a noisy rate-of-rise (RoR) curve. Here I hint on a simple way to get a less noisy RoR signal on systems with limited temperature resolution. Just increasing your sampling interval.

Probat Probatone

Probat is opening up to 3rd-party roasting software. The Artisan team is proud to be picked as one of their first collaborations. Thus, in the last weeks we worked together with Probat engineers to establish the connection between Artisan and their Probat Probatone roasting machines.

Recent Roasts Properties

Remember that day when you had to roast 100Kg of that Colombian bean on your 5Kg machine? You might have become tired re-entering all the same roast properties over and over again to document your roasts. A new feature in Artisan v1.1 allows you to store and recall up to 25 recent roast properties.

Artisan v1.0

After a long journey that started at the end of 2009, the development of Artisan finally reached version 1.0. Download it from the Artisan GitHub page. This one introduces only a few new features w.r.t. the previous one, but adds some small improvements and bug fixes. For the full list of changes and additions see the Artisan change log.

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.

Videos: Curve Controlled Roasts with FZ-94 and Artisan

See also: http://kostverlorenvaart.blogspot.nl/2016/08/complete-curve-controlled-coffee-roast.html

The video below may be a little boring for some because I did not cut footage from it to skip any part that may be uneventful. Do slide back and forth at will to see / ignore any part you want.

First successful curve controlled FZ-94 roast with Artisan

(See also: my previous blog)

Roastmasters working with a PID like the Fuji PXG4 could in the past already enjoy the "autopilot" feature of Artisan, making sure the roast profile neatly coasted along the curve saved from a previous roast.

Now, Artisan has its own internal software PID and if you can link it to a device that influences your Bean Temperature (BT), you could use this option to automatically correct the live roast curve to develop along the curve you have as your current ideal.

Coffee-Tech FZ-94 working seamlessly with Artisan

Artisan 1.0 screen with sliders for FZ-94 on the left

Recently, we received the opportunity to get an FZ-94 lab roaster and see how this roasting machine could work seamlessly with Artisan. An inspired back-and-forth between Marko Luther on the Artisan side in Germany and the R&D team of Coffee-Tech in Israël ensued and soon, the first machine was communicating fully with a newly expanded and freshly compiled version of Artisan.

Artisan v0.9.9

A number of productivity features have been added on request to this version. The ones that might be of interest for a wider audience are described below. For other more specific addition and bug fixing see the change log.

Natural Roasts

People typically talk about the art of coffee roasting. We're interested in the science. Therefore, we keep adding features to Artisan that allow to analyze and compare roasts. Here we want to introduce our latest observation and the tools now available in Artisan v0.9.8 to play with the underlying idea.

Signals, Symbolic Assignments and the Plotter

Symbolic assignments are mostly used to adjust readings coming from connected devices or to define so called virtual devices. In this post, Rafael Cobo will get you familiar with the extended symbolic assignments he just implemented for the plotter in Artisan v0.9.8.

Virtual Devices and Symbolic Assignments

Artisan supports a wide list of different devices to read data from and to write data to. Several of those devices can be operated in parallel ending up in more temperature channels than one can fit on the display. Could anybody need more?

Sampling Interval, Smoothing, and Rate-of-Rise

Let me try to explain my perspective on the processing of the raw data gathered from a temperature probe implanted into a coffee roaster. To understand what's going on in roast logging one has to look at the full chain of data processing from the probes to the screen. I assume here that all data is transmitted flaw-less from component to component and will especially avoid mixing this discussion with the spike issue as this can be treated separately.