This paper introduces a practical design for home energy management and monitoring. It has been assumed that the home has a 12 V DC power source and with variable generation power. The virtual house has loads that consisting of four lamps, each with a power of 10 watts and operated on 12V DC. The home can be operated in two modes. The first mode is the grid-tied mode, in which the energy is imported or exported the power to/from the grid depending on whether the home source generation power is greater than or less than its load. The second mode is called the island mode, in which the home depends on its power supply to feed its loads with the required power. The transition between the two operating modes of the home is controlled fully by the Arduino UNO microcontroller according to the main grid status and home status (generation and load demand). The assumption that was set in the designed system is that the maximum current that a home source can supply is 3A. Therefore, when the current that a home needs is more than this value, it imports energy from the main grid and less than that value, it exports energy to the grid. The data of the grid voltage and load current of the home were transferred by the Arduino UNO microcontroller to the Node MCU using RF (HC-12) module. The cases of the main grid and the home power source are monitored in real-time using the Ubidots platform. These cases data raised to the Ubidots platform by using the Wi-Fi-ESP8266 included in the Node MCU board. All cases were tested in practice and the Ubidots platform showed a quick response in updating the data as well as its security.
<span>In this paper, a prototype DC electric system was practically designed. The idea of the proposed system was derived from the microgrid concept. The system contained two houses each have a DC generator and load that consists of four 12 V DC lamps. Each house is controlled fully by Arduino UNO microcontroller to work in Island mode or connected it with the second house or main electric network. House operating mode depends on the power generated by its source and the availability of the main network. Under all operating cases, the minimum price of electricity consumption should satisfy as possible. Information between the houses about the operating mode and the main network state was exchanging wirelessly with the help of the RF-HC12. This information uploaded to the Ubidots platform by the Wi-Fi-ESP8266 included in the node MCU microcontroller. This platform has several advantages such as capture, visualization, analysis, and management of data. The system was examined for different cases to verify its working by varying the load in each building. All tested states showed that the houses transfer from one mode to another automatically with high reliability and minimum energy cost. The information about the main grid states and the sources of the houses were monitored and stored at the Ubidots platform.</span>
<span lang="EN-US">Most of the old machines installed in different industries are managed manually by system operators. This action makes their productivity low and not suitable to cover the needs in other sectors. In addition, these machines are not without risks due to the proximity of the operators to them. The installing a new full system instead of the old one on the same site requires very high costs. So, modernizing the same old system by making its operation automatic has become necessary to reduce the economic cost significantly. In this paper, an automatic control system based on <a name="_Hlk124492942"></a>programmable logic controller (PLC) for the cutting steel plate machine that had been managed manually in a factory is designed. The system includes an Encoder that is used to specify the length of the steel plate to be cut by sending a signal to the PLC. The system operation is completed by using human machine interface (HMI) unit to monitor and control the system performance by the system operator. A practical test for the developed system offered more productivity (more than 30%), more safety, reduces human efforts and the total daily production cost (less than one third).</span>
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