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Labels and QR

Artisan does / TilauScope adds

Artisan does — nothing here. Artisan has no concept of a printed label or a scannable record.

TilauScope adds — printed labels for a roast, a coffee or a storage sack, each carrying a QR code, and two ways to scan one back open: a webcam in BeanCave, or a phone's own camera.

Labels are covered here as objects that get printed and scanned. What a sack label tracks — the pool of ids, assigning and releasing one — is covered in Sacks, stock and conservation.

What each label carries

Label Printed from What it shows Its QR opens
Roast label A roast's record → Print label, or the result form at the end of a roast → 🏷 Label PDF Bean, origin, roast date, key roast figures, flavour notes, a QR The roast's record
Green bean label A coffee's record → Print label Supplier, crop, process, altitude, density, cupping notes, a QR The coffee's record
Sack label The sack labels tool (see Sacks, stock and conservation) A label id and a QR — nothing else Whichever coffee currently holds that id

Roast and bean labels print as a PDF sized to the label itself — 10×15 cm by default, or 7×9 cm for a compact pochette, set once in Configuration → 🖨 Printing — so any printer set to print at 100% (no "fit to page") puts it straight onto a sleeve of that size, no cutting needed. Sack labels print directly to a Niimbot thermal printer, sized for its 50×30 mm roll.

A roast label can be printed the moment the roast ends, from the result form itself, without waiting for the roast to be filed — it uses the roasted weight and colour just entered, so the weight loss and colour on the label are the ones being recorded. Printing changes nothing in the record: the form can still be corrected and printed again, or abandoned. If the form is saved without a label having been printed, TilauScope asks once whether to print one before closing.

Printing on the Niimbot

Roast labels can also print directly to a paired Niimbot thermal printer, in two sizes: a full spec sheet on an 80 mm roll, or a condensed card on a 30 mm roll (small enough that the QR is dropped — there is no room to make it useful at that size). Sack labels always use the 30 mm roll.

🖨 Print label opens a preview with a copies count, then prints in the background — a status strip tracks progress without blocking the rest of the window. Printing is refused, with a plain explanation rather than a silent failure, when the roll is out of labels, when the loaded paper isn't recognised, or when it doesn't match the size the label needs.

Hardware — Niimbot B21S

Printing needs a paired Niimbot B21S. The printer identifies its own paper roll automatically; recognising a roll it has never seen needs an internet connection the first time, after which that roll size is remembered.

What a label can spell

Labels print the text as it was typed. Accents and other marks are kept, and a name written in Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Vietnamese prints in its own script — Arabic, Persian and Hebrew read right to left, as they should. Earlier versions dropped accents and could leave a non-Latin name blank.

Thai is the one exception: it has no letterforms available and prints blank. Written in the Latin alphabet, a Thai coffee prints normally.

Scanning a label

A printed label can be opened back up two ways.

From BeanCave, with a webcam. 📷 SCAN opens a live camera preview; holding a label up to it decodes the QR and opens straight to what it points to — the roast card, or the coffee's record. The camera runs only while this window is open, and stops the moment it closes.

From a phone, with its own camera app. No app or pairing is needed: the label's QR is a plain web address. Opening it on a phone already on the same network as TilauScope shows the same record — bean details, or a roast's curve, figures and tasting notes — as a page in the phone's browser.

Note

The phone needs to be on the same local network as the computer running TilauScope. Off that network, the page simply doesn't load — there is no remote access built into this feature.

A sack label works the same way as the other two: scanning it, from either path, opens whichever coffee currently holds that label. A label not currently attached to any coffee says so plainly rather than opening a blank or wrong record.

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