This paper describes the development of a centralized controller to charge or discharge the battery storages that are connected to renewable energy sources. The centralized controller is able to assist, control, and manage the battery storage charging when excessive power is available from renewable energy sources. At the same time, the centralized controller also performs battery storage discharging when the connected load requires a power source, especially when the renewable energy sources are unavailable. Background studies regarding battery storage charging-discharging are presented in the introduction section. Also, generally developed charging-discharging methods or techniques were applied at the system level and not specifically to the battery storage system level. Due to the limited study on battery storage system charging-discharging, this paper reviews some of the similar studies in order to understand the battery storage charging–discharging characteristics as well as to propose a new conceptual methodology for the proposed centralized controller. The battery storage State-of-Charge (SoC) is used as the criterion to develop the conceptual centralized controller, which is also used as a switching characteristic between charging or discharging when only the battery energy storages are supplying the output power to the connected load. Therefore, this paper mainly focuses on the conceptual methodology as well as explaining the functionality and operationality of the proposed centralized controller. A summarized comparison based on the studied charging–discharging systems with the proposed centralized controller is presented to indicate the validity of the proposed centralized controller.

COVID-19 is a contagious disease caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The disease has spread worldwide, leading to an ongoing pandemic. The most common symptom of COVID-19 is fever which can be detected using various manual screening techniques that have the risk of exposing the personnel. Since the virus has globally spread, a reliable system to detect COVID-19-infected people, especially before entering any premises and buildings, is in high demand. The most common symptom that can be detected is fever, even though people with fever might not have COVID-19. Thus, a real-time analytic face thermal recognition system integrated with email notification that has the capability to scan the person’s temperature and simultaneously analyze the measured temperature with the recorded/stored information/data is presented in this paper. The proposed system is also able to send an email notification to the relevant authorities during the real-time analytical process. Besides that, this information is also recorded in the system database for continuous monitoring of the respective person’s health status. The development of the proposed system is integrated with a Thermal Module AMG8833, Pi camera, and Raspberry Pi Zero Wireless. The proposed system has been tested and the captured results successfully accomplished the development objectives.

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This paper describes Agri-Snaps, an Internet of Things (IoT) agriculture monitoring system designed to improve farmers’ acceptance of using IoT technology in their farm field. Agri-Snaps consists of four dedicated sensor circuit modules that integrate magnetic pogo pin connectors for easier assembly with the controller circuit module. This work investigated how such a design can enable the farmers to understand how 1) to assemble, 2) self-troubleshoot, and 3) maintain the monitoring system independently without requiring expertise on the farm site. User-experience testing was conducted with ten participants to validate Agri-Snaps’s viability. The results showed that those participants positively rated Agri-Snaps as attractive, easy to understand and assemble, exciting, and innovative compared to the typical agriculture monitoring systems.