BehmorThing

Sign up for Dropbox using this link:. http://www.dropbox.com. Dropbox allows you to share files between multiple machines. You create a Dropbox folder on each machine you care about and link them together and whatever you put in the Dropbox is soon replicated on all the machines. Put your BehmorThing files there and you can see your roasts from all your machines. As a side effect, it also backs up those files to the Dropbox site. You get 2Gb of storage for free and if you use that link, you get 2.25Gb and I get an extra 1/4Gb as a bonus. If you know your name password you can also access those files from any computer and you can also use it to securely share files with others. It also makes an easy way to get files to or from an iPhone, iTouch or iPad.

Sign up for Mozy using this link: http://mozy.com/. Mozy automatically backs up your files to their servers. Use the link I supplied and you'll get 2.25Gb of free backup. It's easy, it works and it's saved me and some of my clients on more than one occasion. And if you sign up and start backing up, I get another .25Gb of space to help keep me backed up

I wonder what happened to 23? A new user pointed out that the coffee orders stuff was very messed up so I've made it better. Well, I think it's better. Please try it and let me know if it's still broken or needs more work..

The Manual add roast page now has a button to apply the default time for the current Behmor button settings to the start time.

After I added the ability to hide blends I realized it would be nce to have a way to see only blends so there is a new menu option on the Coffee Inventory, "Show Only Blends."

Fixed a crash running under Linux. Added the ability to hide individual blendswhen using "Hide out of stock"

Someone in Europe noticed I'd made a mistake when manually logging in degrees C.
He also wanted to be able to change the color of the moving line to something other than white so he could print with a white background and use less ink. so now you have "Duration Line"
I just noticed that when adding an SM coffee from an existing coffee that the original coffee was overwritten, Oops!! Sorry about that. I swear I tested it but I guess that minor error escaped my notice. anyway, it's fixed now and you definitely want to upgrade to this version before using that function.

I think I changed thte number to .18 a while back because I did some cosmetic and non-essential changes and wanted to remember to put it up. I've no idea what that might have been but whatever it was, you get it in this version.

Well, I thought I improved something and in the process removed the ability to add new vendors and other table items. Oops!
There was a problem manually entering temperatures while manually logging.

Oh yea, there is now an orders tab on the coffee detail page. Not likely so useful for home roasters. It's just a first baby step for one of the users to look at. So it doesn't do much yet and won't till the next major upgrade when I move to a new database engine and from developing in Visual Studio 2005 to developing in VS2010. But as always, your thoughts are welcome.

A few small fixes. The elapsed time for cracks had too many decimal places. You could add two coffees with the same name but different capitalization. And I forget what else.

A bunch of small fixes and small stuff. Many changes to Preferences, please go through them after installing this version.

Dramatic improvements to the temperature logging stuff. If you use this make sure to set up the colors and lines in the Preferences form. You may now log as many temperatures at a time as you wish, well, up to 20 or 99 I forget which and considerably more than you'll ever likely need. And if it's not enough, just ask, the limit is arbitrary. Each temperature logged will use a detached dialog and will be color matched to the line on the graph.

My USB connected dual thermocouple board is working and now correctly logs and saves both temperature logs. There are currently 3, I have one, one is waiting for someone to open the box and the third is up for grabs after the second one is working for the second person.

If you go to View/Statistics on the Roast List form you can see how many roasts you've done and how much coffee you've roasted, I'm at 124 roasts and 91.5 lbs of roasted coffee.

Someone pointed out that I wasn't correctly calculating the cool down times if the roast reached the end and went into automatic cooling and I believe that is now correct.

I've been working on the user defined profiles but that will come with version 2.5 that will be along soon. The company that supplied the database I use has gone belly up and when I get my next computer I will no longer be able to install the version of their software that I'm currently using so I've started another version in parallel using the final version that doesn't need a stupid registration server running to be able to install.

I've recently been beta testing http://www.altitudecoffee.com which is an online coffee roaster trying to bring the benefits of home roasting to the people who don't roast. They sent me 5 or 6 varities of coffee to taste and use to play on the web site. As is usual for me when they were sending out the 4 ounce samples to the 30 testers, I got 12ounce samples instead. The benefits of actually working at being a beta tester. I mention it not to suggest you buy coffee there, but as an interesting place to send people who want good coffee but don't want to roast it themselves. My palette is not so refined, but some of the testers there were just enthralled with the concept. Me, I just like beta testing and free coffee just made it that much better. It should go live early next month I will at some point try to get them to use BT and post the roast graphs so their customers can use that to help decide what to order and maybe understand how the different roast profiles affect the flavors.

Reports! People have been asking for reports for quite awhile and I've resisted. Partly because I don't print things and partly because I don't want to design a report nor do I actually want to write a decent report tool. So I decided I'd generate mail merge files so you could create your own report. Though that reminds me that I did write a report tool once. I'll have to see if I can find it.

You get to this by choosing "Export to Word" from the File menu in both the Roast and Coffee detail pages. The files are called CoffeeReport.tab and RoastReport.tab and they are written into the same folder as your BT database, usually "My Documents/BehmorThing.

At some time, save the file and then anytime you open that document it will pick up the most recently generated data.

If you used tabs in your notes, they will all be replaced with three spaces and any returns will be replaced with "~~~~". You can easily put the returns back by replacing "~~~~" with "^P" which is Word speak for new paragraph. If turning tabs into spaces is a problem, I'll do something similar for tabs.

If you create a report you're happy with and are willing to share, please send me a copy of the file so I can upload it here for others to see.

And if you were wondering about the thermocouple board, mine, the only one is working just perfect and today I ordered some heaters from eBay so I can properly make the rest. if you look at the picture further down this page you'll see a black square at the top of the board. It has no visible pins and has to be soldered in an oven or with a heat gun. I did mine with a heat gun, but if I'm going to do more, I want an oven so I purchased what I hopefully need to build one.

A few minor changes including some fixes in the temperature logging display. .12 was a beta released to the mailing list members and it's been changed to 13 for release.

There is a new setting in preferences that allows BT to look for it's thermometer and I mis-coded it so it always looks. It seems that can cause a problem on some machines if it finds the wrong device in it's quest. This version respects that flag and I'll go back and re-think how to not hang the program when I find whatever that problem device is.

I partly fixed a problem with timing displays in the Roast List. Depressingly, it also broke something. If there are no first or second crack times and there is a pre-heat the preheat time will show up in those columns. When I figure this out, it will be right but for the moment this seemed like a better solution. If you disagree, please let me know.

But the more important new feature, one I've been promising for months, is the ability to add SM coffee's without having to do any work. If it's off the SM new coffee list, just choose the menu option File/Add. If it's just a number like 1000077 choose Add New Coffee, then File/Add SM Coffee and put that number in the new box and click Go. You can play with it and as long as you don't Save there will be no consequences.

I was working on some future stuff that should have been hidden and is in the way if you're logging temperature. And Thursday-Saturday is the SCAA conference in Anaheim and I'll be there. I'm bringing a camera so hopefully I'll have some pictures to post or at least thought for the list.

If you use Inventory in Kilos, you might find a problem, this should fix it. Sorry.

Some very minor improvements to the roast graph. I roasted some Brazil Moreninha Formosa "Raisin" Coffee today and noticed some issues with the crack lines so I cleaned them up. Probably worth the upgrade.

Well, I guess it's time to make this official. There's a bunch of preliminary stuff for non-Behmor users, there's pre-roast blends for those who want to play with that, KWH gathered an extra decimal point and there was a problem with the buttons on top not going away when you closed a newly added coffee. Probably some other really minor stuff I've forgotten about along with a feeling among the masses that there is a problem with the door open/door close timing and or functionality. Life has gotten very hectic so I've been moving slower on this. Lots of the software I use is still DOS and in the process of building a new i7 64bit W7 machine for my office I discovered that 64bit Windows will not run DOS apps so now I have to convert the DOS software I still use to Windows. It's very sad. I went to 64bit because that machine really needs more than 3gb of RAM and it never occurred to me it would have that problem. I will get around it for the short term by running 32 bit W7 in a window on the 64bit desktop, it works but it's clunky.

So, since more than one person seems to think the door stuff has a problem, I'd love any more feedback about if you use it, how you use it and if you use it, what would make it better.

So I've been off doing other things for a while, one of which was designing this and having it made. It should in a week or 2 allow BehmorThing to log 2 separate K type temperature probes with no user intervention. As soon as it works, I'll start on the piece that will allow getting the probes into the bean mass. For a point of reference the card it's sitting on is a business card. The sockets are the small Omega thermocouple sockets which should make getting thermocouples easy.

This is still a beta. Blends, well, pre-roast blends are done, if you don't think so, tell me. please.

And for people not using Behmors, there's been a lot of progress on the Used Defined Profiles front. Some of it is on Utilities/User Defined Profiles, the rest is on the Roast Coffee page and only shows up if you Hide Behmor Features. Again, feedback welcome.

And another request. My wife thinks it's time to make the site more professional looking so if anyone has artistic tendencies and would like to help with a logo, a new name or design ideas, I'd live to hear them.

This is still a beta. Blends, well, pre-roast blends are sort of done. Please tell me if it's at a point where I can release it. Also, there's more stuff on the User Defined Profiles option page. Mostly for one person, but have a play if you want..

This is still a beta. Blends, well, pre-roast blends are sort of done. There are some things I've missed, some I've even been reminded of but forgot to do, feel free to remind me again.

Please look at it and let me know. Now, "update inventory" should correctly move coffee from the individual coffees to the blend when you click update inventory after deciding how much of the blend to make. I'm sure that there is something that I've completely overlooked, but as I sit here writing this entry I can't think of any holes. The weird thing is I've been struggling with this concept for ages and getting nowhere and then just after I started the BT mailing list the input from that small focused group of people led me to what I think is a very clean and simple interface for the pre-blend version. I still want to implement post-blend, but I've still not gotten my head around a reasonable answer to that question.

This is a beta, it has a couple of features that may or may not show up long term. One is blends. You can make them and edit them. You can even roast them, but I don't suggest it as it won't work right. It also occurred to me a few minutes ago that the buttons 1/4, 1/2 and 1 make no sense for the "I roast in metric units" folks so those buttons now show the equivalent gram amounts. If you like that idea I'd love to know and if you hate that idea I'd love to know also.

You can choose "New Blend" from the coffee list file menu and have a play with my current thoughts on implementing blends, you may also go back and modify them.

A couple of very minor fixes. Mostly it should get rid of the "do you have any left?" message that pops up for some of you. It's supposed to be there, but it ought to only appear if the system thinks there is less than a gram left, so little you probably just roasted it all anyway. There was a problem with adding new coffees for a few hours that might effect a couple of you on 2.0.1.3.

And once I realized how easy adding pictures to roasts was, it seemed I might as well add them to coffee too. Shopping was renamed to Vendors and I added a direct link to roastmasters.com.

Well, this was just a note about Norton but then I discovered that I put DoorClosed instead of DoorClose and well, that will cause you all a problem at some point so here is that fix and now you can add a picture to your roast results. I don't know why you might want to, but there it is. I hope it's enjoyed. Utilities/Add Picture from the roast detail pages.

Depressingly there is a bug in the download detection stuff in the newest version of the Norton Anti-Virus that will flag this or any other downloaded .exe file as containing the Reser.Reputation.1 virus. It's not me, I just tested the file, uploaded it, clicked on the download button above and lo and behold, the exact same file is suddenly infected. It's been reported to Symantec, hopefully they'll fix it soon. The following link describes the problem if you're interested.

Well, still no answer about how the roaster works. We now know you can solve the P2 problem by adjusting your roast size if that's a suitable solution for you, by opening the door just after C1 starts for a bit or maybe some other way. I figured since enough people talk about the door open trick that I should make it so you can keep track of it. Please if you want to use that feature make sure to go to preferences and choose a color for that line on the chart. The line to mark the door open shows up ant the bottom of the chart below the previous roasts crack markers. The previous roasts door open line will be shown in a slightly different color in a thinner line that will line in the middle of this roasts door open mark. That's probably not clear, but you'll understand the first time you see it! Once you click "Door Open" you'll see the line start drawing along with the time so you'll know when the door has been open long enough.

I've been putting this off for weeks in the hope that Joe Behm would step up and tell us how the roaster actually works so I'd know if it was the right thing to do. It's been long enough and the evidence is clear enough that I've gone ahead and done it. I was hoping there would be a way to avoid this and I apologize for leading us all down the wrong path. Many of us read the manual and no one ever questioned that the way I've show is the way the machine works until about 6 weeks ago. Heck, I read it when I first got my machine and it seemed to make sense at the time. Now I read the manual that was posted on the Behmor web site and I realize that a reasoned argument could claim the machine works one of about 3 different ways. All of us, I believe Joe included, thought it worked this way because well, it's the only way that makes any sense. But, it turns out all of us were wrong. I've done a fair amount of testing on the 1/4 lb profiles and while I can't say with absolute certainty that those finding apply to the 1/2 and 1 lb profiles, I find it had to imagine they don't.

So, with all that lead in, there is now a check box on the first page of preferences that allows you to turn off the visibility of the + and - buttons marked "Start". I have tested enough of the 1/4lb profiles to be almost certain that pressing those buttons before pressing start has the same effect as pressing the buttons marked Add. And so it turns out the only way to adjust the actual timing for a given profile and weight is by using the ABCD buttons.

This is likely the last version for a long while. It's been a labor of love, but I'm way to emotionally invested in this because someone treated me like a leper. It's time to move on and try to make some money in this business as the $200 I've made so far with this project hardly makes a dent in the time I've put into it. Not to say I'd trade it for anything else, It was worth every minute and made ever so much better by the handful of users who contributed ideas and bug reports. I know I'm not perfect and I know many of you are much better roasters and data collectors than me and without your help this program could never have become what it is today.

Up above there is a "Behmor Mailing List" button which will take you to a page where you can join a small group of Behmor users to discuss roasting with the Behmor roaster.

And if SM and any other suppliers, I've tried calling Roastmasters and am waiting for a call back, wishes to help me make it easier for you to move between BT and buying or getting information I'll be happy to add them to the new shopping menu. The best example of what I'm talking about is to go to Shopping/SweetMarias/New Coffee Listings where you can see a listing and descriptions of all the new coffees at SM. If Josh keeps his promise to me, I'll be able to add an option on that list to "Add Coffee to inventory" which will be able to fill in everything from the SM listing, notes, region, country, price, cupping score, etc... That's something I personally really want. So, if you buy greens from somewhere and you'd like that feature for your supplier, have them contact me. It benefits all of us. The better the beans the better the coffee and knowing what's available when it becomes available makes it easier to get the best beans. But, I need your help to make that happen.

Weight was not deducting from inventory on Manual add roast. I rearranged the fields on the Roast Detail page. Please if you think it's worse, let me know.

A few minor changes and fixes. Nothing earth shattering, but worthwhile updates and fixes.

A couple of people reported small errors in profile times and those are fixed in this version. Also new is a menu option off Help/Sweet Maria's called "New Coffees." This brings up a list of all of SM's new coffee listings for the past bit, including the date posted and a short versions of Tom's notes. Choosing File/GoTo or right clicking and choosing GoTo will take you right to that coffee on the SM web site. As I've said before, if you get coffee somewhere else and you'd like their info here too, either tell me who they are or tell them who I am. When I look around it doesn't seem like there are many other vendors who constantly have new coffees, but I'd be happy to be corrected.

And if you don't like the list of SM coffees coming up at startup, turn it off in preferences.

Someone complained about the annoying Mozy box. It was supposed to be a way for me to give you information about important things going on in our world. Starting with this version that box will optionally contain a list of the most recently added coffee's at Sweet Marias. If you buy coffees at SM this may be a cool feature, if you don't, uncheck I Shop at Sweet Marias in preferences. If you'd like the same thing for the place you buy your coffee from tell them about me and what I did for SM and let them know I'd be happy to do the same thing for them. I had to learn about downloading and parsing XML from websites because I needed to write an interface between a customers DOS application and his new credit card processor, but that knowledge let me do this and will with help from SM let me automatically enter all the coffee information from SM when you enter a new coffee you've just bought from them. Same offer for other vendors, if they enable the interface, I'll happily make my end work.

I know it's crude and it ought to have links to the coffee on the SM web site, but it's a start. Well, now there are self updating direct links to all SM's new coffee's on the Help/Sweet Marias menu.

The User Defined Profiles now allow placing labels on each node. They are controlled by the scroll wheel which will cycle through the 3 choices, above, below and none. You can now also save the profile so it will still be there the next time you open it. You still can't use it for anything, but I'd still like feedback if you think it might be useful. Ctrl+D will hide and unhide the checkboxes so you can see what it will really look like.

A number of small fixes. The crack times displayed slightly incorrectly while roasting. The last crack markers had gone away. There is a preview of a potential new feature on the preferences menu.

Well, if you have versions 50-54 I would highly recommend you upgrade to 55. I broke some things which have now been fixed. Some will effect cleaning cycles so you should probably check in preferences if your cleaning cycle counters are correct. Some might effect inventory so if BT runs of of coffee before you do, blame me. If you use the temperature recording stuff you might see a problem with the temperature display for roast history done in the past week or two. If so, you'll need to send my your data following the directions here so I can fix it. Same if you see a message on every startup that says if you see this more than very occasionally, tell me.

If I did everything right I should be able to print Roast info pages with the graph at the bottom. If this is of interest, PDFs showing me what you'd like this to look like would help make sure you get what you want. I almost never print anything so ideas would be appreciated.

Logging multiple temperature probes at once. Started but needs more thought. You can now detach the Temperature logging buttons. someday you'll be able to detach more than one and each will create a different log. This one is annoying, I wrote code years ago in another language that would make this trivially simple and I see know way to port it. Hopefully I figure it out before the dent in the wall becomes a hole.

User defined profiles. All the underpinnings are mostly there so you can define a set of times and heat goals. Mostly for non Behmor users, but it would make it easy to mark the profile for things like when and how long to open the door for simulating P2 while using P1 or anything else you want. If this sounds interesting and you have thoughts on it, please let me know what you think.

If any of those interest you in particular, let me know as those of you who've been squeaky know the squeaky wheel really does get taken care of.

This in theory adds support for 220-240V machines different profile times. This means I had to completely rewrite the code that dealt with times. If you see a problem, either with max time allowed or initial time on a button press, please tell me so I can correct it. I also fixed a problem with Manual Add roast. Manual Add roast needs to be completely rewritten to support the new underpinnings but for now it will at least save again. Make sure to check the voltage setting in Preferences. 117 for the USA, whatever you've set your Behmor to if you have a 240V machine.

Almost nothing here. It fixes a problem with asking to subtract a roast from inventory multiple times if you're seeing that. Also, if you have not checked "Hide Behmor Features", most all of you, and you don't have the word "Behmor" in the roaster box you will be asked if you used your Behmor roaster. Saying no, will extend the cleaning cycle one additional roast. If this ends up to be too annoying, please let me know. It's been there for awhile so I guess it's not really a problem, but that's why it's there.

The upgrade from older versions had a minor problem with some peoples databases. The times on charts with preheat has been improved, it now counts time from the start. So a 15 minute roast with a 2 minute preheat now displays as 17 minutes long.

For those of you who record temperature, you can now bring up a remote copy of the logging buttons. So you can browse the web while keeping the temperature buttons on top.

When a new version is put up, the link in the notice will take you right to the status page where I've added a Download Update button.

And FYI, the numbers of people who either roasted over the holidays or got a Behmor for Christmas and downloaded BT spiked in December. Usually the program is started about 1100-1200 times per month, but in December it shows 2130 with 464 downloads. For comparison, November was 1235 starts with 272 downloads. And don't worry, that's all I know, how many times 2 different files were downloaded. No idea who you are or where you live.

More internal improvements. The Behmor profile line is now more correctly drawn when using the Add "-" button. The Roast Coffee graph and the View Roast pages finally use the same code to display the roast graph. Which means working on the code is much easier but I may have missed something and one or both may display some minor thing wrong. The Total roast time and the incremental steps now include the preheat time to improve readability. You can now edit more things in the View Roast page. Don't forget the Utilities/Expert menu or that you can set Expert Mode on permanently in Preferences. And to re-itterate:

Many of the changes in the last version or three have been in preparation for Joe confirming that everything I've taught you about Behmor profiles might be wrong. We'll see if Joe ever answers the questions I've posed there.

Missed a couple things and while I was at it, I added a default roaster setting in preferences.

In preparation for fixing BT to properly support whatever the profiles end up looking like, I re-wrote some of the internals as classes so I could more easily make the graph a class. If it's Greek, I'm just planning for the future and making it much easier for me to add new features and correct some old ugly code. I've also at someone's suggestion added a "Master Roast" checkbox on the roast detail page so that you can flag all the roasts you want to use as base roasts to copy from and then on the Roast list view menu, you'll see "Master Roasts" which will show only those roasts so marked. Also, in the Coffees you can now pre-set the Behmor buttons for any roasts made from that coffee. I fixed a bug where if a first time user presses cancel when it's asking you to select the Sample file, BT will close as expected, but will never be able to be opened again, !Oops!!!

And if you're unlucky, I broke something, but I've looked and not found it. But history has proven again and again that I'm just not that good at looking. On the positive it should be easier to find bugs now.

It covers recent tests by myself and others that seem to conclusively indicate that the roaster we know and love does not actually operate the way we were told, i.e., the functional description in the Behmor manual and on Behmor.com of how the roast profiles work is wrong. What this means to you is if you want BehmorThing to give you accurate representations of roast profiles you should only use the 1, 1/2 and 1lb buttons to set the weight, use P1-P5 to set the profile and use A-D to set the shape of the profile. Using the "+" and "-" buttons beside the word "Start" will lead you to wrong conclusions as they work the way the manual describes, but in the actual machine they have no effect what so ever. Depending on Behmor's response in the thread I've indicated above, I'll be updating BT to match sometime in the future. For the moment, I just suggest you stop using those buttons.

This can be observed by watching a Kill-a-Watt or just watching the heating element. 100% means the heating element is on all the time, the rest of the percentages seem to be 15 seconds on and 2 to 8 seconds off. It's easiest to see on P2 as the change dropping from 100% to 60% is dramatic but the others can be seen if you watch carefully at the appropriate time. Kill-a-Watts may be found for under $20 shipped if you look carefully, I got mine from NewEgg.com. They are not as useful as their web site would indicate but it will tell you when the element turns on and off and if the afterburner is working.

Because of the way the heating element control seems to be implemented you may not notice a change for up to 15 seconds after a change is indicated. My observations lead me to believe that at any change in heat level the element is switched on and the timer is started for that section, so if the timer was already on, it will be an additional 15 seconds before it turns off.

And near the end of the roast the heating element may also be controlled by the thermostat that keeps the roaster from going up in flames. So even on P1 which is indicated to be 100% power for the whole time, the element may be turned off if the roast chamber gets hotter than allowed.

And now it gets better, I just went to www.behmor.com to read the manual to make sure I'd not misread it and I could find nothing mentioning profiles. So I read every document and every page of the web site and nothing to be found. Checking the properties of the manual on the web site reveals it was re-written today and all the words dealing with how profiles work have be removed from the manual. So, hang on to your old manuals. and maybe even write a letter to Joe asking what's going on.

Manual add roast had not been updated to work with the new weight system. The Preferences page has been modified again. There is a new Cleaning tab and it has a way to adjust the cleaning cycle counter in case it gets messed up.

I was messing around with profiles and found that some of the times on the roast graphs were off. I also changed the detail pages so that if you make them small, scroll bars will appear. probably most useful for those using screen smaller that 1024x768. Some netbook screens are 600 or fewer pixels high and I didn't handle that properly. Didn't know I could or even how to, but it seems to be all better now. If you fall in that category a note letting me know one way or the other would be nice!

I went to roast some decaf today and I had to roast from inventory and discovered I'd missed correcting the weight there too. Oops!

While I was at it I cleaned up the tab order again on the coffee and roast detail pages.

A few more small problems fixed. Adjusting the clock speed didn't work, duplicating a roast would come up with wildly wrong starting weights and now if you change the ending weight on the roast detail and then Save, the selling price info will be updated.

Now both Roast grids correctly display the roast weight. And even better if you change the "Roast In" units on the Measure Preferences page the grids will show the roast weights in the new units. Should have done this long ago, but better late than never.

And I didn't quite get it correct in the Roast Detail page which wasn't very important, but I made it so you can't roast coffee, and that is! Oh well.

All that work fixing the weights and I forgot to fix the money. Well, I fixed most of the money, I just never changed a coffee and noticed the price saved wrong if you're in pounds or ounces. Oh well!

So this is a long needed upgrade that I've been not doing because it was just a bunch of annoying work. Starting with this version weights and prices should display correctly even after changing the measurement units in preferences. So if you have 1 lb of coffee that cost $5.00 and you change to Inventory in Kilograms you now have .42 Kilograms of coffee which cost $11/Kilo with a total cost of $5.00. Also there is a new page in preferences called Costs. This will let you put in some numbers and BT will calculate and display the suggested sale price on the Roast Detail page based on your parameters. If you put in an ending weight it will also show the Cost/SellingUnit for the batch at the indicated price.

While I do not expect there to be any problems, there are a lot of changes I made to accomplish this and it's possible I've missed something. I think I've tested it all, but testing your own code is weirdly more difficult than testing someone elses code.

Also, if you have an opinion about how I've implemented the pricing feature, I'd love to hear about it. It calculates the incremental pricing on the pre-roast weight. I originally did it on the post roast weight but then I realized that using the green weight meant I could calculate a price without knowing the roasted weight. I only need the roasted weight to calculate the Cost/SellingUnit which will show up if you enter the roasted weight

How embarrassing! Yet another misplaced comma in the File/New code. I really need to be more careful with that. Nothing but that one pesky extra comma has been change since version 40.

Just a few very minor bug fixes. If you clicked the temperature logging button twice in 1 second you'd get a divide by zero error. If you tried to change the cleaning cycle intervals they would be correctly saved and respected, but when you returned to the preferences page to check they would still show the default numbers. If you checked Hide Cleaning Cycles and then quit the Roast List the setting would be properly saved, but it would not be respected when you opened the Roast List the next time. I finally added "Hide Cleaning Cycles" to the Both Form. Also, those of you who have been using BT for a long time may find that "Hide Cleaning Cycles" do not actually hide really old cleaning cycles. If this is a problem for you, please let me know. It has to do with the difference between how I started implementing cleaning cycles and how I finally implemented cleaning cycles or maybe it has to do with what happened when I imported them from the old version.

There has been a thread for a while on HB about tracking the delta change of the roast temperature and it occurred to me that it would be reasonably easy to display that on the temperature logs on the Roasting pages. I forgot to put it in the .38 release and it bugged me so much, I put up a second version today.

When I made right click work on the column headings I also made it not work on the first row of the grid, fixed. On the third tab of the preferences I've added a box called "Time (What is 10 minutes)" which will allow you to adjust the speed of BehmorThing's internal clock so that it more closely matches the speed of your Behmor roaster. You may set the number between 970 and 1030. which sets the time for 1 second between 970/1000 and 1030/1000 real seconds per indicated second. If you find it useful but need more adjustment, just ask. Note that the Behmor's clock is most likely controlled by the internal R/C oscillator in it's processor and that will vary with time and temperature. How much it will vary is unknown, but I'd guess faster at increased temperatures and slower when it's cold.

Well, Michelle started using Behmor thing in the last few weeks and she brings a fresh pair of eyes to the table. So you can blame her for what looks to be a flurry of upgrades. This one fixes a small problem on the Manual Add Roast page and changed all the places where you needed Middle Click to the Right Click it should have been all along. Once I figured out how it was easy, it was the figuring out that took some time.

My, I broke File/New. Silly me! And I added a small feature yesterday while I was roasting as that's when I notice things and for the life of me I can't remember what it was. But I just went and looked and it was when adding a coffee the note font was not set to the correct size so I fixed it there and checked the others.

And yet another one and this one just a day later. And it was going so good! This one is a bug fix, though a very minor one. Turns out if you used the Statistics feature on the coffee inventory page that it would always show 2 more coffees and 2 more pounds than you actually had. I tested it by seeing if the numbers seemed to make sense and I had enough coffees and lbs that I wasn't willing to accurately count so it's probably been broken since I did cleaning cycles. It also would count coffees that you'd run out of which is probably incorrect, so starting now it will tell you how many coffees you have where the weight is greater than zero and what those coffees are worth. It seems like that's the correct answer. But, as always if you have a reasoned argument why that's wrong, why you'd like additional statistics or what additional statistics you think would be useful, tell me and I'll likely grant your wish.

I also just discovered I could put Excel formulas in a txt file so I changed the export so the coffee value is now a formula which multiplies weight times cost/unit.

Well, a new update and only 2 days after the last one. You will be happy to know it's not because of a problem, just a new user Behmor user popping up and wondering if there was a way to track elevation as the manual suggests that elevation has something to do with the profile you should be using. That for reasons I don't completely understand made me wonder if also keeping track of the Plantation(Farm) would be useful so this version adds those two fields to the coffee inventory. They have also been added to the inventory list and if you want to see them you'll need to go to Utilities/Forget/Forget all table settings. I guess one of these days I should fix the whole system used to set up those grids. It's not like it doesn't work the way it is, but having to start over every time you want to make a change is a bit tedious, isn't it? I'd do it right now, but it's one of those things I didn't do quite right to start with and fixing it is a bit more work than I have time for at the moment.

And again props to Yakster who come up with another grand suggestion. you can now hide all the cleaning cycles when looking at the Roast history. Makes perfect sense, about 99% of the time it's just noise and if we're being good Behmor disciples, it's about 17% of the list. Thanks again!

Someone reported that if you made the comments on the individual items on the Cupping form longer than the conceptual limit of 20 characters that the program would crash. The limit is no longer conceptual and there should no longer be a problem. Yakster, the person who comes up with the most new ideas for BT, asked for a way to search the notes of coffees and roasts so I've been thinking about it for a while in the hopes of coming up with a decent implementation. Searching is easy, a good interface is sometimes really hard. Don't even know if this is it. Anyway, search is now implemented on the Coffee and Roasts lists and I'm not at this moment disappointed in how it turned out. I'm not particularly happy either, but until I figure out how to do it better or one of you points me down the path of truth, this is what we all get to live with.

No problems fixed that I remember, but the annoying "Saved" message that comes up when you save a roast is not gone and when you're duplicating a roast the graph now shows the pre-heat and roast ending times on the graph. It's such an obvious feature that I wonder why it took me so long to notice it missing it and no one using it suggested it. I've started doing pre-heat using P3 for some beans and I've got the pre-heat timer set at 1:50 but on P3 I often run close to 3 minutes so I really wanted to know what it was last time.

I've fixed a bunch of problems with storing inventory in ounces or grams. It also fixes one last problem caused while trying to create your first roast in a newly created database.

I had broken the code that allows creating a new file so while it seemed that a new file was created, you couldn't actually use it. That problem is fixed.

I often get bored while waiting for the pre-heat to finish and decide to look at the inventory or roast history and occasionally let the preheat run a bit long. Now when the Preheat Warning timer runs out and the background starts flashing the roast window will be forced to the top to remind me to pay attention.

If you use 2 roasters, one of which is not a Behmor and properly select a roaster without Behmor in the name you will be allowed to add one to the next cleaning cycle due counter. Also, I think it was waiting 6 roasts per cleaning cycle instead of 5 and that has now been corrected. You will get the message about not roasting with a Behmor if you have Behmor features enabled and your roaster description does not contain the work Behmor. It's for yakster who went camping and wanted to enter the roasts he did over a campfire in a mesh poporn popper. It does not deal with the problem of having 2 Behmors and wanting to keep track of the cleaning cycles for each of the individually. If that's of interest tell me and if enough people ask, I'll probably do it.

The question asked is, "Did you use your Behmor Roaster" and no, I don't think it's a particularly good question, but I can't think of anything better at this moment. If you answer no, the cleaning cycle pointer will be incremented and it will take one addition roast before the cleaning cycle and super clean warnings appear. If you don't want to see it, make sure to select a roaster that contains "Behmor" as part of the name.

I broke something that caused the the preheat profile to be erased every time the program is started. I'm really sorry about that.

A display problem with preheating was fixed and if you inventory in ounces deducting roast quantity should work now. I added Save and Close to the Roast Coffee menu.

The person who requested the ability to manually enter roast pointed out some oddities in the way it worked, so I fixed it. Nothing important besides that.

Some finally tried using temperature logging and noticed I'd messed it up slightly.

Added links to www.HasBean.co.uk and fixed a few minor issues with people choosing the pound symbol for money.

Now the users who roast away from their computer have an easy way to add a roast to the database. For the moment and until it's been reported working as

expected you'll have to get to it by selecting a coffee on the Coffee Inventory Grid, then right clicking and choosing Manual Add Roast. Please if you use that feature tell me if it suits your needs. If you use it, it wants you to record the points in the roast using the numbers displayed on the Behmor's front panel. Also, when looking at a roast's history with no second crack the graph will now display the time between when first crack ended and you pressed Cool.

There is also now a place to keep generic notes. Generic is probably the wrong word, but Utilities/Notes will keep notes that are always there and not attached to any particular roast of coffee. It's really plain, if you find it useful and you'd like it more functional, please ask!

Apologies. Sorry for the flurry of updates. Some were for bugs, some were requests by users and this one is cleaning up the messy way I did weights. Please

right after you install this, go to Utilities/Preferences and make sure everything is set the way you want it. The most important thing is that you choose the settings you want on the new Measure tab. This will allow you to choose both the units you purchase and inventory coffee in and the units you roast coffee in. So finally you can buy in Pounds and roast in Grams and the inventory will be maintained correctly. Well, it seemed to work fine when I tested it, but it's really boring to test so please let me know if I missed something and I'll fix it quick as possible. For those of you with big roasters, it also means you can now choose Pounds or Kilos for roast weights, not much use for a Behmor, but might be just the ticket for someone with an RK drum. Once you choose the "'I Inventory in" value you probably shouldn't change it as it does not correct the inventory, just changes the label. On the other hand, the "I Roast in" value is just a suggestion and you'll be able to change it for every roast if you so desire.

There are some minor changes and fixes and I think the ability to choose Fahrenheit or Centigrade for Temperature logging. Also Print labels has a few new features, Edit/Copy will place all the label text on the Windows clipboard so you may paste it into another program. Additionally double clicking on the Coffee name, Roast date or Roast level will copy that one field to the clipboard.

There is no new version now, but if you're using a different Money Sign than "$" and you still see "$" in the Coffee Inventory you can go to Utilities/Forget/Forget All Table Settings and the symbol will be corrected.

I'd gotten the decimal settings wrong on the weight fields on the roast screens. Now it's 1 decimal for ounces and none for grams. If that's not enough, please let me know. A bunch of the underlying code has been cleaned up and if there was no second crack, start the graph would display wrong when looking at old roasts.

All of the numeric, money and weight input fields have been replaced with new improved versions which try a bit harder to make sure you only put valid data in the fields.

it's likely not perfect yet, but it seems better than it did before. I discovered and fixed a problem with logging temperatures while using PreHeat or maybe I created, discovered and fixed it.

Updates will no longer be in a separate file. I've changed installers and this one works like I want and so updates will be easier for both of us.

Somebody actually tried to use the cupping feature and discovered that it didn't work properly. Many thanks to Gene for reporting the problem. I also finally decided I'd had enough of the window buttons working improperly and fixed them.

Please go to preferences and make sure that the new Ounces/Pounds//Kilograms/Grams selector is where you want it. You can now keep track of inventory in ounces.

There was an issue with un-needed save dialogs when closing the Coffee Detail box. After .15 a new explanation finally let me grasp the problem and if I correctly understand, this should fix it. It was subtle enough I could never find it without a lot of help so it's not likely you ever saw it,

Please go to preferences and make sure that the new Ounces/Pounds/Metric selector is where you want it. You can now keep track of inventory in ounces. There may have been an issue with un-needed save dialogs when closing the Coffee Detail box and if there was, this should fix that.

Bonnie figured out that if you uncheck preheat, it goes away and you can never get it back, oops!!

That error dialog was caused by trying to rename one coffee to have the same name as another. This should have just brought up a message saying that's not allowed, but it didn't.

Someone had an error dialog appear and the message wasn't very useful so I've attempted to improve that message enough I can figure out his problem.

Well, while the cleaning cycle numbering wasn't actually broken, it's now a bit better. In .10 if a cleaning cycle was the last roast and you did a renumber, the cleaning cycle would get it's own roast number. It's not that it was wrong, just not quite perfect. So, now I think it's perfect. I also finally fixed the "roasts till next cleaning cycle" so it works correctly. And as I have gotten the first database to share, I'll be putting up 2 databases today.

Cleaning cycle was messed up, so was the new Super clean. Both are now fixed. The "roasts till next cleaning cycle" numbers on the Preferences page were wrong and I made it so the red cleaning button will appear as soon as you save the Nth roast so you know the instant it's time, not just before you're about to roast the next batch. And I added the ability to send you messages, just to see if I could.

Database Renumber didn't work, but it does now. Well, I thought it did but I was wrong. It does now, but more importantly, a few days ago, Behmor announced a new enhanced cleaning process that should be done every 40 or 50 roasts and so there is now a second cleaning cycle reminder that will come up as often as you like. It starts at 40 but you can set it in Preferences to what you want. When it triggers, likely you'll see it the first time you open BT after this download, a box will appear and remain till you clear it. On it is a link to the page on the Behmor web site where the updated cleaning instructions are located.

Database Renumber didn't work, but it does now. There's probably some other small stuff that was fixed, but that's the first major thing making this upgrade worthwhile.

If the data in the roast history was corrupt in a particular way, the program would crash. That and a few other holes of similar types have been plugged. The odds that you'll see the problem are small, I think it was only there for a couple of days before the software was released. I think I also cleaned up the Preferences a bit.

Labels didn't work or more correctly, picking Print Label would cause the program to crash.

Added scroll bars to the coffee and roast notes on the coffee roasting page. Improved the operation of the Behmor profile buttons. If you choose "Duplicate Roast" you now have the option to have the roast notes carry forward in one of 3 ways or not at all.

Weight in the coffee inventory list is shown as pounds and ounces. In other places it's show as ounces or just pounds. It's so much easier if you just choose metric. I'm considering just changing it to ounces but can't decide if I want to have to think what 236 ounces is in something I can comprehend.

Version 2.0 is released. The differences are significant, the improvements are many and if you're upgrading from Version 1.2 you'll need to use the upgrade tool to convert your data to the new version. If the upgrade utility crashes on you, it worked for all the beta testers but will not work on one computer here, please zip up and send me your data and I'll run the utility for you and return the updated file. Here are instructions explaining how to send me a file. Please before running the update make sure you've downloaded version 1.2.5.0 and cleaned up your data.

In version 2 you can have as many databases as you like, named anything you wish. File/New lets you make a new empty database, File/Open lets you open any database. Preferences allows you to set the current database as the default database.

You can even look at two different files at the same time. Open a file, then choose Coffee Inventory. Notice that the title bar of the Coffee Inventory window shows the database it belongs to. Now without closing that window choose File/Open, open a different database and again choose Coffee Inventory. The new window has the name of the second database and you can look at them side by side. You may also roast coffee from either database, or do anything else and it will use that windows database. You may also copy and paste between windows using the edit menu. The same thing goes for the Roast History window and the View Both window.

A list of really important/significant/cool features and change you might want to know about.

The default database is named BehmorThing.vdb. If you put additional databases in the My Documents Folder and name them BehmorThing1.vdb through BehmorThing9.vdb and then open multiple copies of BehmorThing, you will be able to see a different database in each instance of BehmorThing. You may also copy coffees and roasts between running instances of BehmorThing from the Coffee Inventory and Roast History pages.

You may now configure most of the colors on the graphs using the Utilities/Preferences page. If you are looking at a graph and change the colors you may refresh them by changing tabs and then changing back.

You may now use BehmorThing to manually log Temperature. The log is saved and may be viewed later.

You may now edit the names of the coffees in the Roast history, this is purely so you may clean up your data for the upgrade to 1.3.

The title bar in the Roast and Coffee detail pages was not correctly displaying the number.
The Both form was still displaying Modify Roast
If you have problems with getting a different roast then you selected when choosing View Roast, Utilities/Database/Renumber Database will now fix that.
If you added a new coffee and forgot to enter the profile, BehmorThing will crash when you try to roast it
Renumber was improperly setting the next roast number

Sometimes when I test things I make the clock run 10 times faster and then turn it off before I upload it, this time I forgot to turn it off. Oops!!!

While making the graphs work better while being resized I swapped a couple of labels around.
Renumber databases might not have worked right under some conditions.

I realized that I wanted to know how many roasts I'd logged in BehmorThing and the Roast Number was inflated by the number of cleaning cycles so I've decided that cleaning cycles should not count for a roast, so from now on a cleaning cycle will have the same roast number as the next roast. If you choose Utilities/database/renumber this will automatically be applied to all pre-existing cleaning cycles.
You may now choose the font color on the graph.

If you tried to renumber databases with windows open it would work and then crash while trying to save the window positions.
Adding a new Coffee left the Coffee Number field blank. If this happened, install this version, modify the coffee and then choose Save.

A new Temperature only graph has been added to the View Roast page. It will only appear if there is saved temperature data.
If there are no coffee notes, the Coffee Notes tab will no longer be shown on the Roast and Roast Detail pages.

Modify Roast has been renamed View Roast. Nothing else changed, just seems like a better name.
A couple of minor issues were resolved and temperature data is now saved and can be viewed on the View Roast page.
Temperature data is only saved if there are more than about 15 points.
Increment is now allowed to range between 1 and 20

Someone tried to use the temperature logging stuff and so now it's better!
There are now 4 controls for logging Temperature
    Log Up Button: Logs the current temperature and increases the next point by the increment degrees
    Log Down Button: Logs the current temperature and decreases the next point by the increment degrees
    "Inc" lets you change the increment amount on the fly
    The current temperature, currently allows numbers between 32 and 500 or 0 and 260 for Centigrade
There are now horizontal lines to indicate every 50 degrees that appear after you start logging
There are now vertical lines that show every minute. If you don't want to see these lines, make them the same color as the background, if you want them faint, make them almost the same color as the background.
Minor display flaws in the way the buttons on the roast coffee came up when starting a new roast have been fixed.

Now you can choose most of the colors on the graph, you're no longer stuck with my odd sense of color. See the Preferences page under Utilities.
If you're logging temperature and you want to log the time every 5 or so degrees, you can set the auto-increment value on the Preferences page.

You can now manually add temperature marks to the log during roasts if you have a way to monitor them. At this point they're not saved, but I'd like to know how you feel about how it works. Set a number and press log. You may log up to 100 points. each time you press log the current number and time in seconds into the roast is logged. The ability to log will continue until you press done or the cooling cycle finishes. The temperature will show up as a pink line as soon as you start logging.

The annoying "BehmorThing has lost his data" message that pops up on the first running should now be gone for most people. Probably for all, but I can't be sure so I'll just say most.
There is a new option on preferences to all disabling the annoying changing the weight resets the other buttons to P1 A. It's that way because the Behmor is that way, so you can leave it that way if you want.
When you choose to roast coffee the subtract weight box now shows the name of the coffee in the title bar of the subtract weight box.

This addition is for testing, but every so often someone asks for a way to compare or share data with others and now that I've done this, I think I can do that. If you place additional BehmorThing.vdb database file in My Documents/BehmorThing and name them BehmorThing1.vdb through BehmorThing9.vdb you will be able to open more than one copy of BehmorThing at a time and each new copy will open the next higher numbered file. The title bar will show the instance by placing the number of the file in the title bar like: "BehmorThing(2) 1.2.4.14". Now that I've done that, I'll make a way to copy and paste coffees and roasts between instances. Then maybe we can get Tom to keep a database of his coffee on his website so we can just copy his new coffee descriptions and suggestion to our database. Wouldn't that be cool.

Well, the wonders of beating your head against VB for a few hours. it seems that you can now copy and paste coffees and roasts between databases.

And to make that easier the first time you run this new version it will ask for a name. Please put the name in carefully as once you click the button you can't change it. That's so if you share your file the person who gets it can't change your name either. Once you click the button that panel will vanish and never come back.

And as my wife just pointed out it's Friday the 13th so if you believe in such things I probably did something bad by accident.

The buttons on the Roast Coffee have been changed so it's easier to se which 3 have been pushed.
Some issues with filling the Roast coffee box from Duplicate Roast have been fixed.

The Preferences tab now allows adjusting the font size of the notes displayed on the Coffee and Roast detail pages. Mort was here and while I was showing it to him it just dawned on me it might make some peoples lives easier.

I took away the "Always Open Roast Coffee" option as it just doesn't make sense any more. You can Roast coffee from Coffee Inventory or the Roast History.
I took away Coffee from the Tables section because now they come from the Coffee Inventory.
I added a Preferences page to make choosing preferences a bit easier or at least more central. Utilities/Preferences allows you to:
    1. Remember Window Sizes
    2. Always force Expert mode in the Modify Roast dialog
    3. Set the default for Deduct From Inventory when roasting coffee

You can't choose the Coffee from the Roast page because you chose it before you got there.
Coffee is now deducted from Inventory when the roast is saved so the penalty for choosing wrong or just looking is reduced.
Roasting more coffee than is shown in inventory will not longer cause on hand to go negative.
The title of the Weight column in inventory is now On Hand (If you don't like it, middle clicking on the heading lets you change it)
Remember that BehmorThing saves all your grid settings, so if you're updating you won't see the grid changes unless you Forget all Table Settings.

There was a way to overwrite an old saved roast's information with the current roast. leftover features from before you could do more than one thing at a time.
I've added an Expert mode menu option to the Modify Roast dialog so you can edit the un-editable selections and I've removed the option to edit the Coffee as if there is one thing that should be fixed, it's the coffee.

There were some problems with the coffee notes not being loaded into the Coffee Notes tabs in the Roast Coffee and Roast Detail pages.

And yes I realize that 3 updates in 2 days is a lot, but I'd rather fix the problems and have more updates than force the person who found a problem to live with it.

The data in the roast page was not correctly loaded when starting a roast from the Modify Coffee or Coffee Detail form.

Today it seemed like you might like to know what changed when you download a new version. It probably seemed like it a log time ago too, but today I finally decided to do something about it.

When I roast I always set the time long so I never accidently hit the cool cycle to early, a habit I developed when I under roasted the first few batches believing that P1, 1lb would be correct for 1 lb of beans. Maybe for some, but not for me. In a recent change, 1.2.4.4 or .5, I changed the graph so the clock kept running after pressing the Stop, now Cool, button so that you could correctly log the end of second crack even it it ran into the cooling cycle. Given that I never let the machine automatically Cool, I didn't notice that if you let BehmorThing automatically stop, it got all weird and let you do really messy things. So this version corrects all of that mess. I also added a cooling timer so as soon as cool starts or you press Cool the count down timer change to the cooling timer and starts counting down from 13. The count up timer continues to count up from the beginning of the roast.

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Last modified: December 17, 2010