Skip to content

Preparing a roast

Artisan does / TilauScope adds

Artisan does — offers a roast properties dialog where every field is typed in by hand, and a PID whose setpoint is set manually before each batch.

TilauScope adds — a preparation sheet that already knows which coffee is being roasted, reads the batch weight off the scale, judges the batch before it starts, and starts preheating on its own. Nothing is written to the roast until the sheet is confirmed.

Selecting a bean in BeanCave and choosing to roast it opens ROAST SETUP, a sheet in four tabs. Everything below lives there, unless stated otherwise.

The bean and the batch

The ⬥ ROAST tab opens with the coffee itself: name, origin, farm, process, variety, altitude, SCA score — pulled from its BeanCave record, so the coffee about to be roasted can be checked at a glance without going back to the database.

Roast title is pre-filled from the bean name, process and harvest year, and remains editable.

Batch shows the number this roast will receive, and a track batches checkbox turns numbering on without opening Artisan's own batch dialog.

Note

The batch number shown is a forecast. It is only consumed at DROP, so opening and closing the sheet, or abandoning a roast, never burns a number.

Green weight drives everything downstream — the roast plan, the stock count, the weight loss figure. The start button stays disabled until a weight is entered, because a roast without a weight produces a wrong plan and a meaningless yield.

Ticking Decrease bean stock by this weight after OK takes the batch out of the bag's stock in BeanCave, with no second entry.

↺ Rebuild from bean regenerates the descriptive bean text that Artisan stores in the roast file, straight from the BeanCave record.

Weighing from the scale

With an Acaia scale paired, a ⚖ SCALE window floats beside the sheet showing live weight. Clicking the value writes it into Green weight; double-clicking it tares the scale. No retyping, and no leaving the sheet.

If a weight has already been entered by hand, TilauScope asks Replace Weight? first, rather than silently overwriting it.

The line under the value says what the scale is doing: tap to use when a reading is live, connecting… while the link is being established, disconnected when it is lost, and no scale — tap to retry when it could not be reached. A scale that has gone idle is asked again for about a minute; tapping the empty value asks once more. The scale stays connected after the sheet is confirmed, so it is still live at the end of the roast.

What the coffee and the room are doing

The ⚙ OPTIONS tab holds Physical properties: density, moisture and green bean temperature, pre-filled from the BeanCave record where they are known. These three feed the roast plan directly and shape the projected drying time — a humid, dense coffee does not dry like a dry, light one.

With an ambient probe configured, a 🌡 AMBIENT window floats beside the sheet with live room temperature, humidity and pressure, and those readings are stored in the roast file when the sheet is confirmed. The day's conditions are recorded and accounted for without being typed in.

Target roast profile sets the Agtron level being aimed for. It drives the roast plan and the predictions on the INSIGHTS tab.

Judging the batch before it starts

The ⓘ INSIGHTS tab reads the batch and says what it expects — before the drum turns.

Green signals flags whatever is outside the norm in this coffee or this batch size, and what it implies for the roast.

Load & setup shows whether the batch suits the machine, with a fill bar for under- and overloading.

Phase cheat-sheet (RoR) gives the RoR bands worth holding in each phase, available before the roast rather than discovered during it.

Predicted targets projects total time, DTR and weight loss.

STRATEGY condenses the whole thing into one sentence for this coffee, on this machine, at this target.

Note

Predicted targets stays empty until a target roast profile is chosen in ⚙ OPTIONS — the message Select a roast plan in OPTIONS to predict DTR, weight loss and time. is a prerequisite, not a failure.

Automating the start

The ⚙ MORE OPTIONS tab decides what happens without being asked.

Enable TilauPID at start of roast, with its Target temp, starts preheating the moment START is pressed — see Preheating: TilauPID below for what it then does. Input: BT / ET chooses whether preheating aims at bean temperature or at air temperature.

Under Roast automation, four milestones can be marked automatically:

Option What it does
Auto Charge Marks CHARGE on its own.
Auto Drop Marks DROP on its own.
Auto Dry End Marks dry end on its own.
Auto First Crack Marks first crack from the crack counter.

Auto Dry End has a prerequisite

It needs a Dry-phase BT target set in Artisan → Phases. Without one, the box can still be ticked but the automation is switched off when the sheet is confirmed, and TilauScope says so: Set a Dry-phase BT target in Artisan Phases first. The feature is not broken — it has nothing to aim at.

Hardware — Auto First Crack

Automatic first-crack marking listens for cracks, so it needs an acoustic source: the TilauAmbient probe or an Omniflux. See Hardware and peripherals.

Telling TilauScope which machine it is

The machine profile is not part of the sheet — it is set once, in TilauScope → TilauScope Config..., under Machine Profile → Model, from sixteen predefined roasters. See Configuration for the full detail of that dialog.

The profile is what makes the guidance specific: the roast plan, the pre-roast benchmarks, the slider labels and the load checks all follow from the machine's real characteristics — its thermal mass, its expected turning point, how finely its controls can be set.

Machines TilauScope cannot drive

For a machine adjusted entirely by hand, tick Read-only (monitoring only — Artisan does not control the machine). Every control slider disappears — in Artisan and in the assistant — and the application confines itself to recording BT and ET. Guidance becomes advice to act on rather than a control to move.

Unticking it restores the sliders exactly as they were, so a manual slider setup is not overwritten by a trip through read-only mode.

An uncatalogued roaster needs no profile at all: leave Model on — select a roaster model — and tick read-only.

Drum speed is set before the roast, not during it

Drum speed is treated as a setup parameter. It is computed once for the batch, from weight and density, and applied at CHARGE — then left alone. On machines where changing drum speed mid-roast disturbs the temperature reading, TilauScope will not propose the gesture at all.

There is nothing to set: the value arrives with the roast plan and needs no attention. It is listed here because when drum speed is decided matters — see The roast plan for the value itself, and The guided roast for what happens at charge.

Preheating: TilauPID

Preheating decides how the first two minutes of the roast will go. Charge into a machine that has not settled, or into one that has overshot and is on its way back down, and the drying phase is already compromised before any lever has been touched. TilauPID exists to make that starting point repeatable, which is why it is worth understanding rather than simply leaving switched on.

Ordinary PID control chases the error it can see right now: it heats until the setpoint is reached, by which point the machine's stored heat is still arriving and the temperature sails past. TilauPID instead steers on where the temperature is projected to end up, so it eases off before the setpoint rather than after it.

During preheating

Between START and CHARGE, the assistant shows its Preheat page: how far the machine is from the setpoint, which way RoR is trending, and one instruction to act on. The page comments on what it is doing rather than leaving you guessing — PID ramping to SV — let it work, charge when BT is stable ± 2°, then Approaching SV — PID will cut heat; slight overshoot is normal, and finally ✅ SV reached — stabilize then charge. The charge button becomes available once bean temperature is stable.

The page carries a Burner slider, so preheating can be corrected by hand without leaving the assistant. On a read-only machine the slider is hidden.

Following the preheat on the roast graph

The assistant window is not required to see what preheating is doing. Whenever TilauPID is running, a Preheat panel is drawn on the roast graph itself, next to the bean temperature curve, and stays there until CHARGE is marked. It reports the target setpoint, the temperature being steered on — bean or air, whichever the Input setting selects — the remaining gap to the setpoint, the current RoR, the burner power TilauPID is applying, and how long the climb still has to run. The header changes colour as the machine closes in, and the remaining time is replaced by Ready to charge once the setpoint band is reached.

This is the same information the assistant's Preheat page gives, minus the commentary and the burner slider, for roasting straight from the Artisan window.

the roast graph during preheating

It learns your machine

Preheating calibrates itself across roasts. Two things are re-derived from your own previous roasts at the same setpoint: the power needed to hold that temperature, and how early to ease off to arrive without overshooting. Both are properties of your machine and your room, not of a specification sheet — which is why they are measured rather than assumed.

There is no button and nothing to maintain. The second roast at a given setpoint already benefits from the first, and the model keeps sharpening as that setpoint is reused. Changing setpoint starts a fresh model for the new one.

Checking what it learned

Each time the model is consulted, TilauPID writes a short diagnostic to the application log stating what your history suggests for that setpoint — the holding power it settled on and how much lead time it expects to need. It is there for the roaster who wants to see the reasoning behind the preheat, or to understand why a preheat behaved differently from the last one. Nothing needs to be read for TilauPID to work.

PID Autotune is a different tool

TilauScope → PID Autotune is an advanced, separate tool. It calibrates Artisan's own PID gains by watching bean temperature as the machine heats, band by band. It is unrelated to the preheating described above, which needs no calibration from you. Use it only to tune Artisan's PID itself; it has its own PID Parameters Help for what the gains mean.

the roast graph during preheating

Starting

Confirming the sheet closes it with a Start a new roast message naming the coffee, and the guided assistant opens and docks itself, ready for the roast.

Next