I’m focused on building a Roast Controller GUI to automate and track my coffee roaster. I wanted to document my progress and share as much as possible. For several months I seemed to spend a LOT of time trying to deal with blog spammers instead. It’s sort of weird having all these bells and whistles for the blog software. I’ve got all sorts of filtering tools installed to stop the blog spammers from even SEEING the blog. Then for the ones that don’t get stopped looking at the blog there’s yet another array of tools to stop known spammers from registering accounts and commenting. Pretty much on a DAILY BASIS the system automatically kills upwards of over 150 unique IPs trying to spam this thing. This leaves the rest of you that stop by here and look things over. I like you guys. Every so often I get a comment or an email from one or two of you so I at least know some of you come back regularly and a few have even started following on Twitter. I know some of you are curious what exactly I’m trying to do as my “target” roaster.
If you’ve been around enough to read the older blogs and/or looked in the forum you might have seen some of the parts lists that I’ve purchased on my path to automation. I’ve mentioned a few tools I’ve used to develop various pieces and I figured I’d show you some of what I’ve been up to… First of all I need to build a “development board” for coffee roasting automation that will be migrated from Arduino to PIC32 eventually. I’ve had some renderings made of portions of my current “board layout” I’ve been slowly cobbling together.
View showing dual TRIACs and Heat Sink w/ High Voltage Terminal connections.
–Low Voltage pins, position for DB-25 interface to a micro controller wire harness and the control panel socket.
Finally is my favorite piece that I’m eager to get to. When I can finally get my PIC32 project back up and running I have a GUI mostly built that I need to replace the smaller one with. I used a tool called VGDD by a guy named Fabio. His website was found here: http://virtualfab.it/mediawiki/index.php/VGDD:Visual_Graphics_Display_Designer
This product is used to design GUIs for Microchip brand processors. These include (mostly) the PIC18, PIC24, and PIC32 that can use the Graphics Object Library (GOL). The Microchip provided tool is pretty much a very crude tool that yields complicated junk that needs a LOT of effort to integrate. Fabio’s product instead turns the entire process into something pretty simple, allows you to actually write code quicker to control the screen transitions by pressing the buttons and then simulate it (AND send it to other people to review) without ever having to compile it. It makes the Microchip system quite attractive to create a GUI on.
The great part is with the new GOL 3.0 and some new graphics chips you can create higher resolution GUIs and this development tool doesn’t seem to mind one bit. One of the screens I built for watching the roast will look like this on the 7″ touch screen. I cropped a roast curve from one of the logged roasts I made a few weeks ago into the blank space for the graph. At this time VGDD does not appear to have the chart/graph function included into it. I’m thinking there’s a way to allocate the space for it in the system but I haven’t really concentrated on it.
Simulated Auto Roasting screen prototype from VGDD.
I figured I needed to clue more of you in as to what was going on and hopefully this helps explain it!
Some of the buttons/controls will change slightly as time goes on but I figured I needed to start allocating space for things as I came up with the ideas and see if it made sense. As you can see from the date on the GUI mockup there’s been a long time since I started working on that screen. With the recent Arduino progress I’m feeling like I’ll be getting back to the fancier GUI that will sit on top of the Arduino back end in the coming months. Eventually I’ll convert some more functions BACK to the PIC32 system since it seems to run faster and can do more of the math faster. Then I can free the Arduino up to just responding to commands.