TL;DR - Is there any decent documentation anywhere of Roastime? Even some basic docs of the major features and how you are meant to access them would be a big help.
After a dozen or so roasts, I’m trying to get the measure of the things I can do with Roastime. Since I’m keeping beans constant right now - starting with the same (self designed) espresso blend I’ve been roasting on my HotTop for the last few months - I started out trying to reproduce the kind of cup I was getting there (having roasted with the HT for almost 20 years, I’m pretty good with it so that has taken a number of roasts) and then playing with some variations. I’ve been using overlay mode to tweak one thing at a time, and now have a couple of roasts among them I am really happy with - as good or better than what I can get from the HT - where there are some limitations I have found in what can work due to roasting a blend (needing to keep drying slow to “synchronize” beans of different size and moisture before proceeding to the rest of the roast).
Anyway, I decided today to try to “playback” a roast recipe from a previous roast, and it didn’t work, because “playback” was greyed out when I went to select it when “Charge” was announced. It’s honestly pretty frustrating to use trial and error to figure out Roastime one roast per trial. It’s decent software, and if even 1% of the development effort were put into documentation, it would add a huge amount of value to the effort.
So… maybe I just didn’t dig in the right place (I pretty good at digging though) and someone can point me to a user manual or some other docs?
“choose what you want.” There isn’t really a manual for RoasTime there. (I’m not asking for a manual for the Bullet, which I have already stripped to the ground and rebuilt). The closest is under the download link for RoasTime:
Coming Soon.
Which pretty much indicates that this simply doesn’t exist in any official form.
Not only did I kill overlay, I killed RoasTime and restarted it. It was still greyed out. I have found a few circular paths of links that seem like they will take me to a manual, but instead simply take me back to where I started, which is part of my frustration. I guess I was hoping that someone had written an “unofficial manual” of sorts. Although it’s honestly on Aillio to provide support, I don’t think it would be a huge amount of work to create something useful.
It’s a feature list, but not really a manual or user guide, and seems to refer to an older version based on the screenshots. I will admit, it’s better than nothing, but far short of reasonable software docs. I suspect anyone who has been using RoasTime could write a better manual than that in an afternoon.
So I’m new to this group and to RoasTime. It’s a year and a half later and I’m hoping somebody can point me to a manual? I’ve google searched to no avail. I tried going at it on my own and have too many questions to post them all. I don’t know if I’m having real problems or if it’s my lack of knowledge that I’m doing something wrong. I’ve learned for most things like this it’s the latter. Any help is much appreciated.
The question to you is what are you looking for? This forum has a wealth of information as well so you might want to just start searching and reading the threads - that’s how I learned about roasting on the Bullet itself. There’s a lot of people here who are helping each other out.
I’m used to working on my Hottop 2k+ with Artisan and it’s quite a bit different from RoasTime. I’ve got (some) of the basics fairly well down on roasting in general, but as far as the RoasTime software I don’t. To mention a couple things, I love the idea and plethora of recipes in this group but can’t get them to “playback” or use them in the “background”. Playback it is getting stuck on the first numbers like P7 and F2 all the way through. The +/- buttons on the screen don’t change when I click them (they do onthe R1 but then what’s the purpose of the software). Trying to use it as a background is the same results, I can only control it on the roaster. I love the idea of autonomating good roast profiles (or recipes). Any ideas on that one? Thx–J. R.
Unfortunately I personally don’t use “playback” or “overlay” or recopies" - I pretty much manually roast based on my manually written down roast plan. Check that you’re at least on a later version of RT, currently at 3.4.1 but there will be a 4.0 coming out (currently in beta testing).
There are other in this forum who may be better at telling you how to use playback, overlay and recipe features.
Yes there is if you input your inventory and make sure your roasting data syncs between RT and RoastWorld. The inventory management is actually on RoastWorld. There has been some glitches due to changes to the backend recently, but I think those issues are resolved. My workflow in this area is I use RW to enter my beans that I bought (I don’t use RT for that, I prefer the RW interface for that), including the total weight of the greens. Then when I finish roasting, in RT I edit the roast profile to enter the bean name and green weight, when I save in RT it will sync with RW. You can also do this edit in RW by selecting the “untitled” roasts in RW and make your edits. It should update your inventory in RW.
