Sliders and offsets in Artisan

Michael Herbert is working on a beautiful online manual for Artisan users, entitled Artisan Getting Started Guide - Coffee Roasting -- a web page with the link to a PDF of the manual.

He emailed me asking if I could clarify something:
"There are mysteries in many of the dialog boxes.  For example what are the Offset and Factor for in the Events dialog > Sliders Tab.
If you have a good written reference on the automation features that you can point me too that would be useful."
So here goes!

You may have a set of sliders like mine here on the left in the illustrations below:

Roast profile with sliders on the left
In principle, the slider for FAN could be used from 0% (OFF) to 100% (MAX speed).

See for example https://artisan-roasterscope.blogspot.nl/2016/08/fz-94-4-taking-control.html with this illustration where the slider ranges from 0-100 and the effect is also 0-100%:


But that would mean we could only use part of the slider range productively, since during roasting, the slider would be in my case on 33% as a minimum, to ensure the heating elements will always be able to release their energy without overheating, and to have a minimum of airflow through the bean mass at all times preventing a 'smoky' aroma in the output of beans. So 0% on the slider actually equals 33% of airflow capacity, and 99% of slider corresponds to 99% of airflow capacity.

See the middle column in the example card below (I believe those are not the exact numbers I use today but it's an illustration taken from an earlier blog).

Example of a possible conversion card of sliders and capacity of drum speed, fan speed, heater power/duty
Therefore, in the slider setup menu, I have entered the numbers to get this result:

Note: disregard the "command" entry as this may very well be different for your roaster.

You may wonder how I found the values for "Offset" and "Factor".

Marko Luther made me a simple little spreadsheet to get these values:

Slider values spreadsheet
This spreadsheet is available here:


You can disregard the example text on the left. If you want to spread 0-100% of the slider over 40-70% of the capacity, you enter those numbers as 4000 and 7000 under the 0-100 fields and to the right of that you read the values for Factor and Offset.

PS Jan van der Weel wrote:

I just looked at Frans his post and now I understand how it works : ) 
The file creates a lineair line between:

Source (input of slider) - Output control  (Desired values)
0                     4000 
100                 7000


The calculation of all the control points is done by a linear equation that's calculated in Frans his file. 

Source* factor + offset
Source * 30 + 4000

example = (0 *30) + 4000 = 4000
                (100*30) + 4000 = 7000


Reacties

Anoniem zei…
Lots of years later and I came across your blog about Artisan sliders. I am using a Hottop with Artisan and have been toying with automating a roast. So far I get a few things to work, but a few more that don't. My problems may be that I am using a lot of time triggers rather than temperature triggers. Anyway, I tried to download your spreadsheet for linearizing sliders and found that it is no longer there. As I said at the beginning, it has been a lot of years and I can understand your removing the file from your web space. Many thanks for leaving the web page up for folks to look at.
Frans zei…
Thankyou! If you send me an email to nonfoods@me.com then I can send you the spreadsheet.

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