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Industrial pilot projects often rely on proprietary and expensive electronic hardware to control and monitor experiments. This raises costs and retards innovation. Open-source hardware tools exist for implementing these processes individually; however, they are not easily integrated with other designs. The Broadly Reconfigurable and Expandable Automation Device (BREAD) is a framework that provides many open-source devices which can be connected to create more complex data acquisition and control systems. This article explores the feasibility of using BREAD plug-and-play open hardware to quickly design and test monitoring and control electronics for an industrial materials processing prototype pyrolysis reactor. Generally, pilot-scale pyrolysis plants are expensive custom designed systems. The plug-and-play prototype approach was first tested by connecting it to the pyrolysis reactor and ensuring that it can measure temperature and actuate heaters and a stirring motor. Next, a single circuit board system was created and tested using the designs from the BREAD prototype to reduce the number of microcontrollers required. Both open-source control systems were capable of reliably running the pyrolysis reactor continuously, achieving equivalent performance to a state-of-the-art commercial controller with a ten-fold reduction in the overall cost of control. Open-source, plug-and-play hardware provides a reliable avenue for researchers to quickly develop data acquisition and control electronics for industrial-scale experiments. Full article

An antenna array composed of 16 asymmetric distributed monopoles on a circular dielectric substrate is proposed to use as a reconfigurable source stirrer in a reverberation chamber (RC). The distance between antennas is above $\raisebox{1ex}{$\lambda $}\!\left/ \!\raisebox{-1ex}{$2$}\right.$ to ensure the isolation between antennas below −15 dB. In order to ensure the mutual independence of the stirring modes of the antenna array, the 16 monopoles are asymmetrically distributed on both sides with X and Y as axes. The stirring efficiency of a stirrer is related to its size, and usually a higher stirring efficiency means a larger stirrer. The source stirring technique can achieve high efficiency, but the rotation of a source stirring antenna is limited to the radius of the turntable in an RC. To solve this problem, we propose to use an antenna array as a reconfigurable source stirrer, which can achieve a high efficiency of source stirring. As the antenna array can achieve source stirring and mechanical stirring at the same time, the source stirring section is not limited to the radius of the turntable; the switch between the selected antennas of the antenna array can increase the actual stirring samples of the stirring. Thus, the efficiency can be improved significantly and has been verified by the measurement results. The volume occupied by the conventional mechanical stirrer is reduced, which improves the working volume. The figures of merit, such as the field uniformity (FU), the independent sample numbers, the average K-factor, and the total scattering cross-section (TSCS), are measured and compared to the conventional mechanical stirring, mechanical stirring, and source stirring of the antenna array. Measurement results of the reconfigurable stir are illustrated below. FU has the best convergence and the lowest value, below 0.5 dB. The independent sample number is the largest. K-factor is the lowest, and most ranges are below −15 dB. Additionally, the proposed method has the largest TSCS, above 2 ${\mathrm{m}}^2$. These confirm that the proposed reconfigurable source stirring technique outperforms other three stirring techniques significantly. The antenna array can be easy to disassemble and install in different RC. With a wide range of working band, the proposed method can be applied to 5G OTA testing. Full article