According to the National Coffee & Tea Research from 2022, 8 in 10 Dutch people sometimes drink coffee. In addition to the standard coffee packs in the supermarket, there are several roasters that offer specialty coffees. The technical hobbyist can take the next step and get started with a coffee roaster to adjust everything to their own wishes. One of the most important things while roasting coffee beans is recording and following a roasting profile to achieve a reproducible result. An open source solution for maintaining and tracking these profiles is Artisan. For additional information in video form about roasting coffee beans, a good starting point is James Hoffmann's “Coffee Roasting Explained,” which can be followed by the “Getting the Most from Artisan's Tools” video. On our forum, people interested in coffee come together in the Coffee: from whole bean to cup of delicacy topic. Artisan version 2.10.2 was released a while ago with the following announcement:
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 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.
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