DIY Coffee Roaster Uses Cordless Drills And A Camp Stove

May 15, 2015 by Ethan Zonca 12 Comments

We’re no stranger to coffee roasting hacks, but it’s been a while since we’ve seen a new DIY roaster design. Thankfully [Larry] has been hacking together a small-batch roaster with a bunch of off-the-shelf parts. He was originally trying to make a fully-automated roasting system, but after a bunch of failed prototypes, he settled on a simple roaster design that works great.

[Larry]’s roaster is designed for small batches of coffee (about 3oz). He has a small hopper with a motorized auger (cannibalized from a chocolate fountain) which drops coffee down into his roasting basket. The basket is mounted to a cordless screwdriver which rotates it to agitate the beans inside. A small camp stove provides the heat, which is placed right under the basket. The beans churn around in the roasting basket and heat up until they reach the desired roast level (typically between first and second crack).

Once the roasting is complete, another hand drill rotates the basket assembly to dump out the coffee. [Larry]’s build includes an assortment of knobs and switches which control the auger, basket speed, bean dumping, and even a “speedometer” gauge that shows how fast the basket is rotating. Want to build your own roaster? Check out the instructions for building [Larry]’s roaster or some other builds we’ve featured before.

Fabricating Custom Displays For A Commercial Coffee Roaster

March 19, 2013 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

custom-display-panel-for-a-coffee-roaster

Roasting the perfect coffee bean is an art form. But even the most talented of roasters can use a little feedback on what’s going on with their equipment. [Ludzinc] recently helped out a friend of his by building this set of 7-segment displays to show what’s happening with this coffee roaster.

The yellow modules hiding underneath the display panel are responsible for setting the speed of the hot air blower and the rate at which the drum turns. They’re adjustable using some trimpots, but it sounds like the stock machine doesn’t give any type of speed feedback other than direct observation.

The solution was to patch into those speed controllers using the ADC of a PIC chip. They each output 0-10V, which [Ludzinc] measures via a voltage divider. After the speed is quantified the microcontroller outputs to one of the displays. Since there’s a different chip for each readout, the firmware can be custom tuned to suit the operator’s needs.

Keep this in mind if you’re still planning to build that coffee roaster out of a washing machine.

Computer Controlled Coffee Roasting

May 11, 2007 by Will O'Brien 15 Comments

I knew about this when it came out, but it never made it’s way to Hack-A-Day. We’ve mentioned a computer controlled roaster before, but this one is far and away the best I’ve seen. [Jeffrey Pawlan] has been selling individual units to the coffee industry (and extreme coffee geeks) – with good reason. He modified an already sweet Hottop coffee roaster (~$500 US) to be completely computer controlled. He wrote a complete software interface that accounts for room temperature to create complex, repeatable roast profiles. More than anyone, I’ve lamented the lack of details on the system. It’s a safe bet that he’s using more than a few thermocouples with a multi-line A/D converter. Anyone feel like writing some open source coffee roaster software? Modifying my current setup wouldn’t be that difficult.