A month after Marko Luther suggested that I would look into serious PID'ing of my roaster and after much preparation and testing, the PXG4 is now complete, built in its box and functioning well:
Fuji PXG4 built in box prepared by Tije
Back view
The complete set of 3: roaster, controller, monitor
Halfway in roast sequence
In the graph below, the red line shows the target bean temp, the black line the actual temp and the yellow line shows how much labor the heaterhas done, controlled by the PXG4, between 0% -- 100% of maximum power, to keep the bean temp in the exact range.
Complete roast log graph
Roast ready
PS addition almost a year later I have moved on to different roast profiles, primarily after reading Scott Rao's book about roasting:
PS 4 January 2018:
Jean-Claude van Damme uses the same box from Conrad in his new action here series.
(also see Daily Coffee News feature ) Tije designed and made the following structure for a tiny and cheap fluid bed roaster, to which Jan van der Weel added the Arduino parts, electronics and programming: Sketch by Tije de Jong Jan sourced a very cheap blower (€ 11) to start with, Tije developed and constructed the mechanics, Jan built together and programmed the TC4 / SSR electronics. On his blog, Jan will specify exactly how the TC4 part is combined and programmed and I will copy these details into this blog entry, just as Jan will use this video in his blog. We did a few test roasts to make sure it works at all and it does. Towards the end, the first roast tended to get a flat BT line and airflow was slightly decreased. 200g seems max load of green beans. Second roast a little more power was given to the heater. Next we will try the Background Roast driven by the PID software of Artisan. A week later, with updated software that works better to change the...
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