Author Topic: Bought a coffee roaster  (Read 4152 times)

hans

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Bought a coffee roaster
« on: August 17, 2016, 05:26:01 PM »
After years of pondering I resumed my idea of buying a coffee roaster. Instead of buying one of the somewhat expensive drum roasting kinds (that I'll probably buy later) I ended up getting a tiny little Fresh Roast SR700. I went for the fancier one and plan to control it using openroast and perhaps building/modding something for larger batches if this turns out to be worth while. I figured I go waste a couple hundred playing around with it instead of a couple grand and find out it's really not my thing. So I'll let you guys know how it turns out.
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jkim

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Re: Bought a coffee roaster
« Reply #1 on: August 20, 2016, 03:22:26 PM »
Ooh. Roasting my own coffee is probably something I'd never do myself, but it is a nice novel idea. Have you gotten the roaster yet?

hans

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Re: Bought a coffee roaster
« Reply #2 on: August 22, 2016, 02:32:44 PM »
I did. I also roasted a batch in my kitchen last weekend which turned out to be a bad idea as I underestimated the amount of smoke it would put off. I tripped the smoke alarms pretty quickly. I also burned the batch a bit, but it worked. I'm not impressed with the software though and I'll probably try and tweak it a bit since there are a few bugs that prevented me from getting it working without tweaks. During the roast it also never reported the proper temp back to the software which I think it partly responsible for the roast moving too quickly and burning. There's an issue about something to do with USB power to the arduino where it's not getting enough. I was going to try it again from my usb3 port and then a powered hub since I guess the device doesn't ask for more power but may need it. Otherwise I'm going to start looking into the code a bit more.

If I wasn't going to use the PC like I was hoping, I'd just go with the cheaper SR500. It seems like a pretty nice device though and worked OK. Roasted very quickly so even though it's small batches of 100g or so you could do a few and have enough for the week.

I think it'll work out once I get the software figured out a bit but I'm a bit less impressed with the fully automated solution and while it's nice to monitor stuff I think that could be done with some thermocouples instead.
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hans

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Re: Bought a coffee roaster
« Reply #3 on: August 22, 2016, 02:36:09 PM »
I was using the Openroast software vs whatever comes with the machine. Nice that it's open source so I can at least play around with it and see about making it work. I tried it first off my old Chromebook but I think I might try and hook it up to an RPI. In theory I think I may be able to port the software to work in the browser too but that might be more work than I'm interested in.
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micah

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Re: Bought a coffee roaster
« Reply #4 on: August 22, 2016, 10:45:53 PM »
I was using the Openroast software vs whatever comes with the machine. Nice that it's open source so I can at least play around with it and see about making it work. I tried it first off my old Chromebook but I think I might try and hook it up to an RPI. In theory I think I may be able to port the software to work in the browser too but that might be more work than I'm interested in.

once you get it in the browser, you could make a nice little software as a service app - people could use your site instead to store their roast data for a nominal fee; then there could be like a social exchange aspect to swap "recipies."  Boom, new IoT money maker idea!  You're going to be rich.  Your welcome.
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hans

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Re: Bought a coffee roaster
« Reply #5 on: August 24, 2016, 01:15:49 PM »
I might have a small issue with market size on that one.
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hans

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Re: Bought a coffee roaster
« Reply #6 on: August 31, 2016, 12:29:00 PM »
I've still been playing around with the software for this thing and it's been quite the hassle getting it working properly. I can control the hardware just fine but have issues reading the response data from the hardware. For some reason the communication gets messed up and it times out on reading a packet after a few successful reads and then shifts some of the bytes around for the rest of the communication. I have some code to compensate for it but now I have to figure out a bug in the Openroast software where it has issues moving from step to step. For some reason the way it's doing the callback when the time runs out for a step call the correct method but I think the object isn't initialized or something so it things there's no recipe loaded.

I'm pretty close to just writing my own based on what I know now but I'll see if I can get this project figured out before that point.

I'm looking into writing something in Elixir to see if it's Python's serial library having an issue or something else. I think I can also write a Chrome app or Android app and be able to use USB OTG to control it too which might be nice.
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hans

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Re: Bought a coffee roaster
« Reply #7 on: September 01, 2016, 12:48:56 AM »
Well I think I have the software hacked now. I have the communication from the roaster "working", it's pretty ugly though, and I modified the Openroast software to manage changing recipe steps on it's on rather than through callbacks using the roaster library, which didn't seem to want to work for some reason I don't understand. Anyways, I got my window exhaust fan from Amazon today so I'm all set to try and do some more roasting this weekend, hopefully without smoking up my house again in the kitchen. I'm not sure how useful the fully programmed setup is going to be but hey, at least it all works now.
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