Automation on Brian Carroll

R1-Eye, vision analysis of coffee bean roasts

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As I described in my previous post Automated Coffee Roasting Analysis, I roast coffee at home on a Hottop KN-8828b-2k+. The Hottop has a viewport on the left side facing away from the control panel. When roasting all my focus is on the laptop, which sits on the right side of the roaster. I can’t really see the beans during the roast and can’t visually assess the changes, which is a key criteria of the beans’ development.

Automated Coffee Roasting Analysis

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I roast coffee at home on a Hottop KN-8828B-2K+. This roaster can connect to Artisan for logging and roaster control. When I first bought the roaster I tried using it with Artisan but I fundamentally didn’t understand the roasting process. It was too confusing to know what to change. The software felt very overwhelming. I like to learn on my own and I couldn’t find any source of information that really helped me understand both the process and the software. I wound up defaulting to the automatic program on the Hottop.

Can I Go Fishing?

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My family and I go fishing regularly at the White River below Bull Shoals Dam. One of the main topics of conversation is “how many generators are running”, as that impacts where you can go, what the fishing might be like, whether you can get out and wade. To get that information, you call the Army Corps of Engineers and listen to the recording.

I thought that was so old-fashioned, why can’t we do that with a bot…just send a text and get the data back through an api. The thing was there was no simple generation count. The data was all in cubic feet per second (CFS)…and down the rabbit hole I went.

Outlook is the Best Productivity Tool Ever, Part 2

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Following up on my previous post, where I described the framework for how I manage work using Outlook, this post focuses on the technology behind it.

I use Outlook Tasks to record all actionable items. I built an Outlook C# VSTO add-in to capture the work. When I am processing my email and find something I need to do, I select that email and click the Add Tasks button in the Outlook ribbon.

.bat File on Windows Taskbar

Sat, 28 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When building my Active Directory search tool, I wanted to launch it from the Windows taskbar. I created a .bat file to activate the python virtual environment and run the program. However, you can’t directly add a .bat file to the taskbar.

To get around this you can rename the .bat file extension to .exe, add it to the taskbar, rename the .exe back to .bat, finally edit the properties of the taskbar icon to point back to the renamed .bat file. Why Microsoft?

LLM-assisted Active Directory Search

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I needed to check Active Directory (AD) to see who was part of a group. I use AD infrequently and keep a list of queries in a text file on my desktop, as I can’t ever remember the syntax.

As I opened my list I thought…wait, I don’t ever have to do this again. Let’s write a program to take a natural language prompt and have our LLM figure out the PowerShell commands. Within 30 minutes I had a functional program. It took several small iterations and these are the prompts I used. Unfortunately, I can’t share the program.

Windows Task Scheduler Woes

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

My favorite cartoonist has a website where he displays daily selections from his archive. I want this in my life but I can’t be bothered to go to a website everyday. So several years ago, I wrote a python script to take screenshots of the cartoons and email them to me (scraping didn’t work). The script was scheduled through Windows Task Scheduler.

Then I changed computers, brought over the code, and have been struggling for days to get the task scheduler to work. The task wouldn’t run the python script directly. I wrote .bat and .ps1 files to try and activate the virtual environment, then run the scripts. I fixed that, then the images were downloaded as black images. Over and over, problem after problem, including changing my password and getting locked out of my computer (… cool hack to restore to come).