Design and Realization of Microcontroller-Based Remote Status Monitoring System for Smart Factory Task Planning Applications

In recent years, the concept of Industry 4.0 has been put forward to emphasize the cyber-physical system applications in smart factories. One key issue to achieve such integration is on effective edge computation and high speed wireless communications. To accomplish such a perspective, this work develops a microcontroller-based module for achieving such goals. NuMaker-IoT-M487 board, which is embedded with the NuMicro® M487JIDAE microcontroller and the ESP8266 Wi-Fi module, is served as the carrier for realizing high performance data computation and Wi-Fi transmission. The frequency resolution in Fast Fourier transform up to 0.98 Hz has been demonstrated. Furthermore, the Wi-Fi module utilizes the MQTT protocol and achieves a data rate of 7.5 KB/s currently. In parallel, the corresponding cloud platform and database are established and a dashboard is created for monitoring the status of machines for subsequent manufacture decision systems. Finally, a demonstration constituted of a machine tool for status monitoring and an AGV for subsequent maintenance scheduling is successfully performed to elucidate the possible application potentials of the developed module for bridging manufacturing and logistic equipment or acting as a liaison between physical modules and decision-making control. In summary, based on the demonstrated performance, it is believed that the designed module should be very useful for related intelligent manufacturing applications in the near future.