Folks, after years of roasting with my Hottop-B, I have reached some frustrations:

1. Random premature manual dumps... great roast going, getting 1st crack...DUMP! NO NO NO!
2. The 165F barrier... especially frustrating after a premature dump.
3. The excessive and annoying beeping. Who does unattended roasts anyway?
4. Saving programs: not needed, better to adjust for conditions during each roast.

Which leads me to no longer trust, want or need the goofy computer module attached to my Hottop.

Does anyone have photos, drawings, or other advice on how to completely remove the computer module and replace it with a few switches and knobs?

1. Master Power Switch ON / OFF
2. Heating Element Control Knob: 1 - 10
3. Bean Dump Switch
4. Fan Control Knob: 1 - 10.
5. Optional excessive beeping switch.

Happy Roasting!

vanboom wrote:Folks, after years of roasting with my Hottop-B, I have reached some frustrations:

1. Random premature manual dumps... great roast going, getting 1st crack...DUMP! NO NO NO!

Random ejection of beans is most often caused by a dirty or failing main fan. The second most common reason is a roaster left unattended and a safety point eject the beans.

2. The 165F barrier... especially frustrating after a premature dump.

Barrier? Please be more specific.

3. The excessive and annoying beeping. Who does unattended roasts anyway?

Anyone who wishes to avoid carbonizing their home.

4. Saving programs: not needed, better to adjust for conditions during each roast.

Easy solution for that. Save a "blank roast" and use the machine manually from that point forward:
- Start a roast by programming in maximum time and maximum temperature and hit "START."
- When it says add beans, don't.
- At that point set the heat to 100% and fan to 0%. Then reset the heat to 90% and then immediately to 100% (this might override any subsequent changes by the program).
- Allow the roast to continue for about three to five minutes. *1
- Throughout this period, if the machine tries to change the Heat or fan, change it back to 100% heat and 0% fan.
- At the end of the time (three to five minutes as mentioned above), hit eject and when prompted after the cooling period, SAVE the program to one of the memory locations.

Now, whenever you roast, use that saved program (but do not save the roast at the conclusion of a session in that memory area). You will always have that "blank slate" from which to operate.

*1 The factory has made changes over the years to the way the program works, and the amount of time as well as other factors necessary has varied and I am not sure what the minimum time necessary to do this is currently set at.

How can you tell if the fan is failing? It seems to run OK. The premature dump happens randomly with no warning. I might try replacing the fan just to rule that out. But I am still interested in modding the hottop to full manual control.

vanboom wrote:How can you tell if the fan is failing? It seems to run OK. The premature dump happens randomly with no warning. I might try replacing the fan just to rule that out. But I am still interested in modding the Hottop to full manual control.

Quite a simple test, but the random nature of it may make it more difficult. Just disconnect the main fan and run a few "empty roasts" (no beans) and see if you can get the 'random eject' to take place.

An alternative is to go the complete opposite direction and upgrade your unit to a 2K+. Once it's connected to a host machine via USB (nearly) all internal protections are disabled and everything you list here is no longer a problem. You can then setup Artisan with on-screen buttons and sliders for full manual control of every feature on the unit. Here's what mine looks like:

(note the sliders to the left and buttons at the bottom for control. Also, my thermocouples appear to read about 20deg too low, so don't be startled by the absolute value of the temps presented)

I should note that I've found the HotTop hard to "steer" manually, and as a result I now tend to automate the entire process through alarms. For that example roast above, my entire interaction with the machine was to charge the beans when prompted and then pull them out of the cooling tray when the cycle completed. Once I have a full alarm program setup for a given bean I can re-create that same roast over and over with zero interaction.

I was asked to share the Artisan alarm profile I used for the batch shown above so I've uploaded the alarms used for this roast here.

It should be noted that the alarm set has a number of calls out to scripts and general behavior that is very specific to my own setup including some weird stuff that might not be applicable for general use. Also, as noted above my thermocouples tend to read pretty low, so you might need to adjust all the alarms up by 20-something degrees.

In general, I start the process with a heat-up cycle that runs the fan at 20% to circulate air which I think might help with getting all the bits of the unit up to heat. An alarm will popup a message and beep the system a couple times before the charge at 300deg, and then you pretty much just let it do it's thing as it changes heat and fan settings when individual temperature points are reached, until it hits 394 deg at which point it will drop the beans. It runs a cooling cycle for 5 minutes, then shuts down the stirrer leaving the fans running until it hits 165deg (or until you start up another roast).

I was also asked about how I approach creating these profiles. For this particular profile I just got lucky, I took a profile I have used for an espresso blend of Central American beans and tried that as a base starting point for this new batch of Peruvian beans and it appears to work well. As such it's not particularly illustrative of the process. In general, I'm mostly operating on past experience knowing that changes in heater power tend to take a minute or more to show up on the thermocouples with the HotTop, and changes in airflow impact the ET more rapidly. The alarm program this came from is on the 42nd version, meaning I've roasted maybe a hundred batches, making occasional changes to the program as I zero into a flavor profile and RoR curve that I like, and have done that 42 times for that specific bean blend (having a consistent source for a single bean/blend is helpful here). Having a dialed-in roast for a specific bean can then be a great starting point for similar beans, which in this case turned out great with no adjustment needed.

As always, the ultimate goal is good tasting coffee in the cup. While I also spend a fair amount of time worrying about things like Rao's observations on RoR and DTR, the proof is what happens when I brew a cup so don't get too wound around the axle chasing pretty graphs.