No abstract

Background: Acceptable food processing techniques require the removal of water contents from the crop or food sample without destroying the nutritional qualities of the food sample. This poses a strict requirement on the dehydrator or oven that will be used in the dehydrating techniques to have the ability to control both temperature and humidity of its drying chamber. Methods: This work centres on how an autonomous multi-farm produce dehydrator that can also serve as an oven can be designed with a raspberry pi and a low-cost programmable logic controller (PLC). The dehydrator gives the users the flexibility to control both the drying chamber’s temperature and humidity from its web interface via a mobile device or the dehydrator’s HMI. Heat energy from the Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) is used so that the dehydrator can be readily available for commercial or industrial use.  The small electricity required to power the electronics devices is obtained from the hybrid power solution with an electric energy source from either the mains electricity supply or solar.. The design was tested by creating an operation profile from the proposed web application for the dehydrator. The operation trend was analysed from the web application’s Trendlines page. Results: The report showed that both the temperature and humidity of the dehydrator could be controlled, and access to historical operation data will give insight to the user on how to create a better operation profile. Conclusion: The setup described in this work, when implemented was able to produce a dehydrator/oven whose temperature and humidity can be perfectly controlled and its generated heat is evenly distributed in its drying chamber to ensure efficient and effective drying techniques use in crop preservation and food processing.

Background: Energy Service Companies (ESCOs) for telecommunication sites operate by providing reliable power supply at 100% uptime and billing the mobile operators accommodated on their sites for power usage. To achieve this, there is a need for them to accurately meter the power consumed by connected telecommunication equipment. Method: This work focused on the design and implementation of a remote monitoring agent (RMA) that will pool both power and environmental data from a telecommunication site. The data pool can be presented as real-time data on the RMA’s webpage, it can be downloaded as historical data, and it can be sent to a remote cloud server at regular intervals. The RMA collects both power and environmental data over an RS485 Modbus network and I2C bus respectively. An alternating current (AC) energy meter and a direct current (DC) energy meter were used to harvest the energy data while the environmental data were harvested using a developed Input/Output controller board based on an Atmega328P microcontroller. Raspberry pi was used as the master controller and Node.js was used to build the application running on the master controller.  Result: The result showed how both power and environmental data can be harvested from a telecommunication site and locally presented on the web dashboard for real-time monitoring of the site power system. The data could be saved locally on the RMA and downloaded for future use. Conclusion: The implementation of this work provided a prototype of the remote monitoring agent (RMA) that can be deployed by Energy Service Companies (ESCOs) in the telecommunication industry to monitor the usage of the power systems on a cell site.

Background: Acceptable food processing techniques require the removal of water contents from the crop or food sample without destroying the nutritional qualities of the food sample. This poses a strict requirement on the dehydrator or oven that will be used in the dehydrating techniques to have the ability to control both temperature and humidity of its drying chamber. Methods: This work centres on how an autonomous multi-farm produce dehydrator that can also serve as an oven can be designed with a raspberry pi and a low-cost programmable logic controller (PLC). The dehydrator gives the users the flexibility to control both the drying chamber’s temperature and humidity from its web interface via a mobile device or the dehydrator’s HMI. Heat energy from the Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) is used so that the dehydrator can be readily available for commercial or industrial use.  The small electricity required to power the electronics devices is obtained from the hybrid power solution with an electric energy source from either the mains electricity supply or solar.. The design was tested by creating an operation profile from the proposed web application for the dehydrator. The operation trend was analysed from the web application’s Trendlines page. Results: The report showed that both the temperature and humidity of the dehydrator could be controlled, and access to historical operation data will give insight to the user on how to create a better operation profile. Conclusion: The setup described in this work, when implemented was able to produce a dehydrator/oven whose temperature and humidity can be perfectly controlled and its generated heat is evenly distributed in its drying chamber to ensure efficient and effective drying techniques use in crop preservation and food processing.