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.

Roast Comparator

While Artisan always allowed to load a second profile into the background, sometimes you want to compare the shape of more than two profiles. For this we introduced the Ranking Reports already in 2016 which allows to produce a nice Web page containing, next to sortable tables with the key data points of the selected roasts, a chart of all selected profiles. The drawback of this approach is that the report is static in that it is not possible to apply ad-hoc changes to navigate the representation. The Comparator allows to compare profiles dynamically.

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.

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.

Understanding Roast Color

Taking the color of a roast is quite simple nowadays. Just prepare a sample and point your roast color meter at it. The device will display the roast color as a number. This may raise some questions.

• Why do different devices report different results on the same roast?
• What does the reported number mean and how does it compare?
• Why does the same device report different numbers for the same roast?

This post resembles our report On Idle Noise, where we identified the sources of temperature measuring noise and quantified their impact. This post shares our observations from over 1000 color measurements taken with Tonino and Lighttells CM100+ roast color meters. Our results can help answer the above questions and may lead to better color measurements.

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.

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 v2.1

This is the Artisan version we will use to prove Scott Rao wrong (or right). We extended Artisan in various ways to facilitate the application of his roasting theory.  Thanks Scott, for pushing us!

On Idle Noise

This note describes how I improved the measuring system of my roasting machine to get more accurate roast profiles, like the one shown above. I got motivated by the work of Scott Rao.

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.

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.

Artisan v2.6.0

 

We dedicate this release to the constructive ones, the creatives, the makers, the innovators, the open ones, the integrators, the ones that lead us forward to make this a better planet for all of us and put the destructive ones, the duplicators and obstructors to shame.

Supporting Between Batch Protocols

Here is our response to Scott Rao's call out to makers of roasting software to offer structures supporting the tracing and managing of BBPs (Between Batch Protocols) and warmups.

Artisan 2

Here is artisan 2!

Roasting with Phidgets

An introduction to automatic roast logging using basic hardware from Phidgets in combination with Artisan. This article focuses on standard USB Phidgets that have been supported by Artisan since 2013. The follow-up post More on Phidgets! describes the extended Phidgets support by Artisan v1.2 covering also the new VINT devices that were introduced at the end of 2017 by Phidgets.

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.