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The TilauScope window

Artisan does / TilauScope adds

Artisan does — one dense window: curve, LCD readouts, event sliders, alarm table, message line at the bottom. Everything is present at once, sized for a desk and a mouse.

TilauScope adds — a separate roasting window built for the moment the drum is turning: large readouts that change colour as a temperature approaches its limit, machine controls in the form that suits the hand, phase blocks whose targets can be adjusted on the spot, and a live column on the right showing what just fired.

This chapter describes the window itself. What the assistant says inside it is The guided roast; this is the furniture.

The header

A single strip along the top carries the actions needed while roasting, in the order they are used:

Control What it does
☰ The main menu.
Power Turns monitoring on and off.
START / STOP Starts and stops recording.
RESET Clears the current roast.
BeanCave Opens the green-bean database.
G / E pill The operator level — see Getting started.
⤢ Docks or detaches the assistant.
Timer The roast clock.

These are deliberately large and few. During a roast, the buttons that matter must be hittable without aiming.

Note

START/STOP will not start a recording if no meter is configured — there would be nothing to record. Configure a device, or run the simulator, first.

The readouts

Three large readouts sit above the control panel: bean temperature, environmental temperature, and rate of rise — the last one larger than the other two, because it is the number that dictates what to do next.

They are not passive digits. Each readout changes background colour as its value approaches a limit: neutral while there is margin, then dark yellow as the value enters the approach band, orange, then deep red at the limit — and once the limit is passed, the background pulses red. A temperature running away is visible peripherally, without reading the number.

Below them, a row of extra counters shows the readings of whatever additional devices are configured, each with its name above its value — colour, humidity, crack count, whatever the setup provides.

The phase blocks

Three blocks — DRYING PHASE, MAILLARD PHASE, FINISHING PHASE — show the roast's progress through its phases, each in its own colour: blue for drying, yellow for Maillard, red for development. Each block carries a subtitle with its target.

A phase target can be adjusted directly on its block, with the scroll wheel or a trackpad swipe over it. No dialog, no menu: the correction is made where the number is displayed, while the roast continues.

When the roast reaches its end, the same area is taken over by the drop and cooling message, so the instruction of the moment occupies the space that the phase blocks no longer need.

Machine controls, in two forms

The four machine levers — on a typical setup burner, airflow, drum and extraction — can be displayed in two different shapes, and the choice is yours. A slim vertical bar at the right edge of the control zone switches between them: click it, and the controls change form. Its tooltip says what it does: Toggle: horizontal sliders ↔ card controls.

Slider rows — one row per lever: name, a horizontal slider, − and + step buttons, and the current percentage. The steppers move by the machine's own step size, so a click is always a valid setting. Precise, compact, and familiar to an Artisan user.

Control cards — one card per lever, each an upright block with ▲ at the top, the value in the middle, ▼ at the bottom, and the lever's name underneath. Big targets, no dragging, and usable without looking closely. This is the form to prefer on a touchscreen, or when standing at the machine rather than sitting at the desk.

Clicking the value itself, in either form, opens a roller to dial the number in directly.

Tip

The two forms are the same controls, not two modes: whichever is on screen, the value sent to the machine is identical, and switching between them never changes the window's size. Pick the shape that suits how you actually stand while roasting.

Beneath both, and always visible, sits the SV row — the setpoint the PID is aiming for. It spans the full width and is never hidden by the toggle, because the setpoint is not a lever like the others: it is the target everything else is working towards.

On a read-only machine, these controls are absent entirely — see Preparing a roast.

The live column on the right

A column along the right edge reports what the application is doing, so nothing happens silently. It is opened and closed by the slim grip strip at its edge — a chevron pointing › when collapsed and ‹ when open — and it fades rather than jumping, so the eye is not pulled away from the curve.

LIVE EVENTS

The upper part is titled LIVE EVENTS, with a count of what it holds and a ✕ to clear it. Each entry arrives as a card:

  • Triggered alarms — the alarm that fired, with its condition and the milestone it was anchored to, colour-coded by what it acts on: PID, air, drum, burner, or an external command. Rather than discovering after the roast that an alarm fired, you see it land.
  • Fired events — each press of an event button, tagged EVT with its command and the time.

Cards fade in as they arrive and stack newest-first, so the column reads as a running account of the roast.

ARTISAN messages

Below the events sits a section headed ARTISAN: the messages Artisan itself emits — the ones that, in Artisan, flash once in the status bar and are gone. Here they are kept, timestamped, newest highlighted and older ones dimmed, up to the last forty, with a button to clear them.

Routine noise is filtered out, so the section holds what has operational meaning rather than every internal notice. When something unexpected happens mid-roast, the explanation is usually already sitting in this list — which is the whole point of keeping it.

The event buttons

Artisan's event buttons are also available as a floating panel that can be moved and resized freely, and that remembers its position and size between sessions. Pressing a button fires its command and posts a card in LIVE EVENTS, so a manual action leaves the same trace as an automatic one.

Placing it where your hand naturally goes — beside the machine, not beside the curve — is the point of it floating.

Window behaviour

The window is frameless, with its own title bar, and can be resized from its corner grip. The assistant can be docked in place of the control panel or floated as a separate window, and the control zone keeps a fixed height so that switching control forms, or docking the assistant, never resizes the window underneath your hands.

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