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.

Symbolic Formulas: Basics, New Variables and Applications

Each Artisan input channel can be intercepted by a symbolic formula before its data is forwarded to the corresponding curve. Symbolic formulas allow to change data retrieved from the input source before it is further processed, displayed and stored in the internal data structures. In that respect, the use of symbolic formulas is usually destructive to the original data received. From Artisan v2.1 on, symbolic formulas can also be applied to the two rate-of-rise channels.

In this post we recap the basics of Artisan's symbolic formula mechanism, describe the new variables that have been added in Artisan v2.1 and explain their interplay by discussing useful applications.

Artisan v2.4.6

 

Artisan v2.4.6 adds structures to calculate energy consumption and CO₂ production per roast.

How to Create the Perfect Background Curve

A background curve can act like a set of rails to ride while roasting. Roast masters often use a successful past roast as a reference in the background to follow and reproduce. This can be very helpful. Frequently the roasts available to use as a reference suffer from imperfections like RoR curves that show dips, crashes and flicks. A question we are asked is how to use an existing curve to create a "perfect" reference curve, a curve with straight line declining RoR using the event times and temperatures from an existing curve. This article will show one method to create a such a reference background curve.

PID Control

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

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.

How close?

Ever wondered how close you duplicated a previous roast profile? A standard measure in statistics to express the average error between a curve and its target is know as Mean Squared Error (MSE) which computes the average of the squares of the single discrepancies between the data values and their targets.

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?

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.

Profile Analyzer

Roasters often want to analyze their roasts to measure consistency, look for aspects of the profile that can be improved, and to create metrics to score the roast against a set quality measures.  Artisan offers many ways to provide information on a roast.  These include the Statistics Summary, Plotter and Math tabs, AUC (area under the curve), and many others.

Artisan v2.1 adds a new set of features to provide additional insights.  These features continue Artisan's heritage of exploring new ways of interpreting roast data.

Artisan v1.2

Artisan v1.2 is a major release. The software on which Artisan is built was significantly modernised, especially on the Windows platform, resulting in better support of the current operating systems and hardware (e.g. high-resolution displays). A consequence of this move is that from now on, only 64bit operating systems are supported and compatibility with Windows XP and OS X before v10.10 has been dropped. Find below a description of the major changes and new features.

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.

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.

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.

Special Events Annotations

A common question asked when analyzing a completed roast profile is "what was the time and bean temperature when that gas change was made?"  To help answer this and similar questions, Artisan v2.4 introduces customizable, data driven special event annotations.  Special event annotations add detailed information in text format to the special event lines.  These annotations speed interpretation of a profile in post roast analysis by writing out the pertinent information directly on the graph. The user has broad flexibility when defining the text and data to be displayed.  This allows bespoke annotations that meet the user's individual needs.

Background Images

Artisan v2.1 allows you to show an image in the background of your profiles. This can be any image you choose.  It could be a logo, a picture of your roaster or anything you choose.

Artisan v2.4.4

This version improves some established automation features to better support the control of preheat and between batches protocols.

Artisan v1.4.0

Here is Artisan v1.4. More than 30 bugs have been fixed w.r.t. v1.3.1 and many suggestions for improvements have been integrated, mostly communicated via our Artisan issue tracker.

UPDATE 17. October, 2018: Artisan v1.5.0 has been released with important bug fixes.

Profile Transposer

The temperatures recorded and logged in profiles during roasts depend on the exact probe placement among other things like airflow. This makes it hard to compare profiles recorded on different machines. Luckily there are some points in a roast that can be identified based on physical changes of the beans during a roast, like the yellow point (DRY) and the start of first-crack (FCs). The recorded temperatures at those points can be compared and used to construct a mapping from profiles recorded on one machine to those on another machine. The profile transposer is a tool that supports the construction and application of such mappings along the temperature axis, but also along the time axis to extend or compress a profile.

Keep an eye on the delta!

Once you have developed a profile for a coffee you want to precisely duplicate that one in future roasts. Artisan allows to load this successful profile in the background serving as a template for your production roasts. While seeing the delta of your current roast curve and that template helps you to decide if you should slow down or speed up your roast at any moment, especially if zoomed into the graph somewhat. However, often a numeric value expressing this delta is easier to work with. What about adding another LCD to show this delta?