Meet the Tonino

Measurement is the foundation of quality control. That's why we invented the Tonino, our own custom-designed color meter, built from first principles to be open, affordable and eco-friendly.

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tonino blue
Why?

Why measure color?

Roasters have always judged the degree of roast by the color of the bean, and today roast temperatures are logged so a good roast can be repeated. The trouble is that profiles vary widely between machines, batch sizes and conditions, so two curves that look alike can land on quite different coffee.

Tonino sidesteps all of that. It maps the color of ground coffee to a numeric scale that is independent of the production process, so roast levels can be compared without bias: between roasters, between machines, and between one year and the next.

Therefore, color is a suitable indicator of the degree of roast for a given raw material.

S. Schenker, PhD, ETH Zürich, 2000

In fact, we found that roast degree accounted for more than 80 percent of the total variation in the sensory properties of coffee.

M. Münchow and J. Alstrup, Roast Magazine, 2020
Features

Features

Small, wireless and open, with nothing to configure before a reading

Small Sample Size

One espresso basket of fine ground coffee, 7 to 14 g, is the whole sample

Gesture Driven

Lift it off the base to wake it, set it back down to sleep

Wireless Charging

Charges on its base and runs around twelve hours away from it

Target Mode

Dial in a target and every reading tells you how far off you are

Your Own Scales

Define your own scales in the app and load them onto the device

Eco Friendly

A low-energy design that reuses parts you already have

Basic Operation

Basic Operation

Tonino reads tamped coffee in an espresso basket, which reduces how much grind size influences the result.

  1. 1Put fine ground coffee into an espresso basket
  2. 2Tamp hard
  3. 3Lift Tonino and put it on top of the coffee sample
  4. 4Read the roast degree from the display
Guided instructionsVideo tutorial
A lightly roasted ground coffee sample in a basket
A darkly roasted ground coffee sample in a basket
Sample preparation, light vs dark
Open Source

Open Source

Every part of the Tonino is open: the app, the firmware and the hardware design. Fork any of it, modify it, or build your own.

The Tonino app, showing a library of roast samples beside a calibration curve
The Tonino app
Technical Data

Technical Data

Sensor
True Color 64-channel photo detector
Measurement principle
Polychromatic reflection
Illumination source
4 full-spectrum white LEDs
Observed surface area
5.3 cm²
Sample size
ca. 7-14 g fine ground coffee (300-500 µm)
Display
OLED color display, 0.96"
Default range
Tonino 50-130, Agtron 20-90
Preheat time
0 sec
Time per measurement
2 sec
Measuring precision
±2 scale divisions
Data interface
RS232 serial via USB
Power supply
Micro USB
Battery capacity
270 mA, 12 h of operation, charged in 4 h
Power consumption
0.25-18 mA (0.000925-0.066 W)
Dimensions
4.7 cm x 3.8 cm x 4.3 cm
Weight
50 g
Included accessories
Calibration and charging base, short micro USB cable
Buy now
tonino blue

Tonino

Open-source color meter

700,00 €

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