There are numerous forum posts about this controller. People use it for controlling popcorn coffee roasters, beer brew kettle heating elements, even high power industrial lighting for video production, saving thousands of dollars off commercial controllers.

Here are two excellent posts about using it for coffee roasting:

Ultimate Poppery II and Pumper - Home Roasting

Hacking the Orville Redenbacher Hot Air Popper to Roast Coffee

Heh-heh, the 'mod', if you can call it that, took me as long as it took to go to the store, buy the unit, then go back there and exchange it because the one I got looked used. That's it. Just plug 'er in and go. :)

After using it several times, I decided the chip, which is a BTA26-600B A320 Triac, is getting too hot. This was designed to provide intermittent power to a router, not continuous power to a heating element. Even though I can replace this chip for $2 on eBay, I never want to overdrive a component like that so I decided to add a heatsink like the guys that use this for controlling heating elements for beer brewing and controlling industrial lighting. Mr P's 110v Harbor Freight controller duel element setup has a nice discussion about this. Here is a photo of his mod:

The heatsink will cost me more than a replacement chip and some work but I like to do things right the first time whenever I have the luxury of doing so. ;)

I decided there's no practical way to separate out the motor circuit and drive it internally so I will just slap a jack onto the shell and use a nice little 32V 750mA plug-in power supply from my trashed HP Piece-O-Crap® printer. That way I can use it on any popper.