So if you’re around when I wrote this you’ll probably see that the theme/layout for the blog has changed. For whatever reason now I’ve discovered that several of the themes out there in the past week or so eat the direct post links. If you were linked to a specific post from outside it would pretty much show you a smiley face… and a title. No more… no less. I replaced the theme with an original file and it plain did the same thing and didn’t work so at least I ruled out the theme file being tampered with.
As a result I’ve had to switch the theme to what it is now just to be sure people could read it. I just don’t have time to fix it right now and I’ll have to get back to it. This will just have to do for now.
I’ve done some more testing with the Arduino based roast computer. Tonight I actually roasted some coffee with it that I’ll try drinking in the next few days. The PID for sure needs adjustments. I’ve got to add some more to the power limits as well. I modified the layout of the board creating a new space for the larger heat sink. If I had a fan drawing air across this heat sink it would be significantly cooler. I swapped out the TRIAC with a model designed for more electric running through it so it should theoretically get less hot. It seems to be working pretty well right now.
I snapped a photo of the new board as well as grabbed a screen shot of the real time processing graph but I’ll have to upload those later.
Coffee turned out ok. Not great (there were signs of the issues I had getting the heat high enough in a few spots) Decent enough. I’ve modified the programming again. After I get this working and roast again I’ll start working on the PID adjustments next. I was out in a garage at night when I roasted last so the heat was pretty critical. It was around 45-50 degrees in the garage while I roasted BUT it did manage to keep up most of the time with some creative fan use.