After the bare minimum research I decided to start my coffee roasting journey with one of these mid-priced roasters I found on amazon. Seems simple enough. I read somewhere to begin with a Colombian bean, so I started with these.

I'll follow up in a few days with the result! For now I'm really happy with how easily everything worked and the appearance of the beans.

IMGUR album of my experience/process. Feedback welcome!

Good job getting the first roast done. I started out on one of those machines and could produce drinkable results within a narrow range. From your pictures your roast looks uneven. Here are a few tips that helped me.

• Only load 5-8oz with the stock arms
  
  Either modify the arms so they there are 4 agitating arms or manually and carefully shake the roast side to side every 30 seconds
  Keep the roaster level when you shake so the lid doesn't come off
  
  220-240 is a good start point. You can lower to 200 after first crack or just keep the heat on at 220
  
  Make sure the ambient temp is above 60F
  
  Heads up. You may get scorching at 240
  
  Make sure your plugged into a 20 amp outlet. This is particularly important if the ambient temp is on the cool side (low-mid 60'a)
  
  Get a fan to suck or blow the smoke for when you take the lid off. If you roasted indoors your smoke alarms already alerted you to this fact.
  
  Two cheap metal colanders and a box fan work well for quickly cooling beans. Or you can buy one of these bean coolers if your feeling lazy.

Let us know how they turned out.

Congratulations on starting your adventure. Many people start out very basic, and it either feeds the interest and they later scale up a bit (or upgrade the features of their first roaster). It can be easy to run into the limits of your first machine, but keep in mind that as your knowledge grows, your ability to produce a solid roast will improve.

Don't rule out looking on places like craigslist and facebook marketplace for your next machine at a reduced price.

Congratulations.
I don't know anything about that machine but I would not necessarily call it ...mid-priced... It is what I would call ... Bottom-of-barrell-priced.

These type items are fine to see what coffee roasting is about and see if it's something you're interested in. They are probably less popular than a modified popcorn popper. As soon as you decide you want to keep roasting and you like fresh coffee you'll be looking to improve what you roast with. Guaranteed. Some amount of temperature monitoring and control is quite desireable.

Either modify the arms so they there are 4 agitating arms or manually and carefully shake the roast side to side every 30 seconds
Keep the roaster level when you shake so the lid doesn't come off

Thanks for the tip. Do you have a point of reference for modifying the arms such that I have 4 agitators? The second set would need to be slightly different dimensions than the original I think.

And thanks for all the other insights and tips. I am definitely already feeling like this wasn't a great investment perhaps... Seems like I could have saved $60-80 and gotten the same output with a popcorn popper.

Google stir oven turbo crazy roaster. Looks like that's the inspiration for the roaster. There would be tons of information on running a rig like yours.