[ Thanks to Linuxaria for this link.
]
“Being a techno-sort of guy, Tridgell wanted to have better
control over the Corretto roaster, feeling that if one could keep
up with the heating process, better roasted beans could be
obtained. So, he went about creating his own Corretto roaster.
After apply a bread maker and a heat gun (like the original, which
is a good sign- confirming the original was good enough for copied
blueprints), Tridgell discovered that using a metal stirrer in the
bread maker and drilling a small hole through the bread maker, he
could hook up a thermocouple to help record the temperature.“With the help of Paul Mackerras, Tridgell created a custom
circuit power device to run through the thermocouple and his Linux,
to feed data to pyRoast. pyRoast is the application that Tridgell
came up with to act as a graph for time, temperature, and which
crack procedure the beans are in. The goal in all of this was to
make great coffee beans at home, without the usage of some name
branded, expensive coffee roaster. It has been told that the coffee
taste better when roasted by hand, compared to the store bought
variety.”