Christmas morning I will be officially be roasting on a new Quest M3. I'm trying to familiarize myself with Artisan a little bit so it's not so overwhelming trying to learn a new roaster and program. I would like to be able to plan/plot a roast ahead of time and then have it in the background screen as my roast progresses. I'm assuming everyone does this? Is this accomplished by "plotting without a device" instructions I've found? You select NONE under devices and then hit "start". Click event buttons and enter your temps as the time progresses.
Also I'm going to be monitoring BT and MET. Is there a way to change the display of ET to MET on Artisan?

Thank you so much. Any other Artisan advice you want to share with me is more than welcomed

There are many seasoned Artisan users around here, but I am just a few roasts ahead of you...
I take it you have downloaded and installed Artisan. The first thing to do is to check and follow the procedure described in the document about installing for a HotTop roaster. There you have the instructions for how to get power and fan settings in your Artisan graph and log, which is nice.
I take it you will use some kind of digital thermometer for the BT and (M)ET values. Try to find a way to connect the thermocouplers to the computer. (E.g. via an Amprobe meter or a Phidget 1048. Ardinuo/TC4 is also popular. I use a Center 301 meter, as that was provided with my Huky 500 roaster.) That will make the whole process much easier, as you don't have to jot down the time/temperature while keeping up with the actual roast. Things get quite hectic at the end of the roast and manually recording data while you are deciding on how much to adjust fan/power and when to drop the roast, while the whole thing is accelerating like crazy is quite challenging.
About your original question: There is a menu choice in Artisan on using a previous roast as background (the curves are greyed down). But you still have to get the feel on the whereabouts of the power and fan adjustments during the phases of the roast for e.g. 1/4 pound and 1/2 pound. See to that you get hold of some cheap beans. Try to find a pound or two of "sweep beans", i.e. a mix of beans that the shop have swept up from the floor... or something else that you feel you can run into a black oily roast, way past drinkability. A good way of learning how the roaster works. B.t.w. when the beans are getting oily, shut down the heat, run the fan on max and let the beans season the inside of the drum.

Great question

I have ordered a quest as well as a phidget 1048, thermocouple set from Erics for BT and MET, and the Scott Rao book on roasting. I also bought a light kitchen cart for use with an old Thinkpad laptop. I also bought BBQ black paint tonight so I can paint the drum and get bigger yields.

I have read here that I will need to plan roasts vs follow along like I did with my air popper.

Playing with Artisan off and on to learn more but I am hoping the roasting book will help with the planning of the roast.

Artisan seems to have some helpful fearures like prediction curves based on current rate of rise, etc.

Goldensncoffee wrote:Christmas morning I will be officially be roasting on a new Quest M3. I'm trying to familiarize myself with Artisan a little bit so it's not so overwhelming trying to learn a new roaster and program. I would like to be able to plan/plot a roast ahead of time and then have it in the background screen as my roast progresses. I'm assuming everyone does this? Is this accomplished by "plotting without a device" instructions I've found? You select NONE under devices and then hit "start". Click event buttons and enter your temps as the time progresses.
Also I'm going to be monitoring BT and MET. Is there a way to change the display of ET to MET on Artisan?

Thank you so much. Any other Artisan advice you want to share with me is more than welcomed

Congratulations on the new Quest M3 to come!

Artisan has a tool named Designer for creating profiles. Designer lets you modify an existing roast profile or start from scratch to create a new profile. More detail on using it can be found here: Artisan Designer Q&A

Creating profiles that you can actually execute will require practice and learning the capabilities of your new roaster. You will need to get some hands-on experience to determine, for example, how quickly you can ramp from end of dry to first crack for a particular batch size and at what temperature to expect first crack for various beans. Looking at profiles posted by other Quest users will certainly help.

I do find having a background profile to guide a roast to be very helpful. I still take lots of notes during each roast to try to improve on the next one.

Dregs