This paper demonstrates the use of Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP), together with Raspberry Pi3 B+ (RP3) as the brain (or the decision making engine), to develop a distributed wireless network in which nodes can communicate with other nodes independently and make decision autonomously. In other words, each USRP node (i.e., sensor) is embedded with separate processing units (i.e., RP3), which has not been investigated in the literature, so that each node can make independent decisions in a distributed manner. The proposed testbed in this paper is compared with the traditional distributed testbed, which has been widely used in the literature. In the traditional distributed testbed, there is a single processing unit (i.e., a personal computer) that makes decisions in a centralized manner, and each node (i.e., USRP) is connected to the processing unit via a switch. The single processing unit exchanges control messages with nodes via the switch, while the nodes exchange data packets among themselves using a wireless medium in a distributed manner. The main disadvantage of the traditional testbed is that, despite the network being distributed in nature, decisions are made in a centralized manner. Hence, the response delay of the control message exchange is always neglected. The use of such testbed is mainly due to the limited hardware and monetary cost to acquire a separate processing unit for each node. The experiment in our testbed has shown the increase of end-to-end delay and decrease of packet delivery ratio due to software and hardware delays. The observed multihop transmission is performed using device-to-device (D2D) communication, which has been enabled in 5G. Therefore, nodes can either communicate with other nodes via: (a) a direct communication with the base station at the macrocell, which helps to improve network performance; or (b) D2D that improve spectrum efficiency, whereby traffic is offloaded from macrocell to small cells. Our testbed is the first of its kind in this scale, and it uses RP3 as the distributed decision-making engine incorporated into the USRP/GNU radio platform. This work provides an insight to the development of a 5G network.
Rubus fruticosus L. is a shrub famous for its fruit called blackberry fruit or more commonly blackberry. The fruit has medicinal, cosmetic and nutritive value. It is a concentrated source of valuable nutrients, as well as bioactive constituents of therapeutic interest highlighting its importance as a functional food. Besides use as a fresh fruit, it is also used as ingredient in cooked dishes, salads and bakery products like jams, snacks, desserts, and fruit preserves. R. fruticosus contains vitamins, steroids and lipids in seed oil and minerals, flavonoids, glycosides, terpenes, acids and tannins in aerial parts that possess diverse pharmacological activities such as antioxidant, anti-carcinogenic, anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial anti-diabetic, anti-diarrheal, and antiviral. Various agrogeoclimatological factors like cultivar, environmental conditions of the area, agronomic practices employed, harvest time, post-harvest storage and processing techniques all influence the nutritional composition of blackberry fruit. This review focuses on the nutrients and chemical constituents as well as medicinal properties of different parts of R. fruticosus. Various cultivars and their physicochemical characteristics, polyphenolic content and ascorbic acid content are also discussed. The information in the present work will serve as baseline data and may lead to new biomedical applications of R. fruticosus as functional food.
Disabled persons usually require an assistant to help them in their daily routines especially for their mobility. The limitation of being physically impaired affects the quality of life in executing their daily routine especially the ones with a wheelchair. Pushing a wheelchair has its own side effects for the user especially the person with hands and arms impairments. This paper aims to develop a smart wheelchair system integrated with home automation. With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), a smart wheelchair can be operated using voice command through the Google assistant Software Development Kit (SDK). The smart wheelchair system and the home automation of this study were powered by Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and NodeMCU, respectively. Voice input commands were processed by the Google assistant Artificial Intelligence Yourself (AIY) to steer the movement of wheelchair. Users were able to speak to Google to discover any information from the website. For the safety of the user, a streaming camera was added on the wheelchair. An improvement to the wheelchair system that was added on the wheelchair is its combination with the home automation to help the impaired person to control their home appliances through Blynk application.
Observations on three voice tones (low, medium and high) of voice command show that the minimum voice intensity for this smart wheelchair system is 68.2 dB. Besides, the user is also required to produce a clear voice command to increase the system accuracy.
Nutritional quality and antioxidant capacity of three edible wild berries (Rubus ellipticus Smith, Rubus niveus Thunb, Rubus ulmifolius L.) from Lesser Himalayan Range (LHR) were evaluated. Their edible portion was assayed for moisture, fats, ash, carbohydrates, proteins, fibers, essential minerals (Ca, P, Mg, K, Na, Cl, S, Mn, Zn, Fe, Cu, Se, Co, Ni) and DPPH free radical scavenging activity was applied to determine the antioxidant potential. The fruit of Rubus ulmifolius L. (blackberry) possessed the highest values of energy (403.29 Kcal), total protein (6.56g/100 g), Nitrogen (N) content (1500mg/100g), K (860.17mg/100g), Ca (620.56mg/100g), Zn (17.509mg/100g) and the strongest antioxidant activity (98.89% inhibition). While the raspberries (Rubus ellipticus Smith, Rubus niveus Thunb.) exhibited more significant contents of dietary fiber (5.90g/100g), carbohydrates (86.4 g/100 g) and Fe (4.249mg/100g). Significant variation was observed among the tested samples in all the investigated features. The combination of bio elements and active antioxidants clearly showed the applicability of these berries as a nutraceutical supplement.
This study aimed at investigating the performances of air drying of blackberries assisted by airborne ultrasound and contact ultrasound. The drying experiments were conducted in a self-designed dryer coupled with a 20-kHz ultrasound probe. A numerical model for unsteady heat and mass transfer considering temperature dependent diffusivity, shrinkage pattern and input ultrasonic energies were applied to explore the drying mechanism, while the energy consumption and quality were analyzed experimentally. Generally, both airborne ultrasound and contact ultrasound accelerated the drying process, reduced the energy consumption and enhanced the retentions of blackberry anthocyanins and organic acids in comparison to air drying alone. At the same input ultrasound intensity level, blackberries received more ultrasound energies under contact sonication (0.299 W) than airborne sonication (0.245 W), thus avoiding the attenuation of ultrasonic energies by air. The modeling results revealed that contact ultrasound was more capable than airborne ultrasound to intensify the inner moisture diffusion and heat conduction, as well as surface exchange of heat and moisture with air. During air drying, contact ultrasound treatment eliminated the gradients of temperature and moisture inside blackberry easier than airborne ultrasound, leading to more homogenous distributions. Moreover, the total energy consumption under air drying with contact ultrasound assistance was 27.0% lower than that with airborne ultrasound assistance. Besides, blackberries dehydrated by contact ultrasound contained more anthocyanins and organic acids than those dried by airborne ultrasound, implying a higher quality. Overall, direct contact sonication can well benefit blackberry drying in both energy and quality aspects.
There is lacking technology application in black pepper farming to automate daily routine activities in monitoring black pepper vines growth and nutrient need. With the revolution of Industry 4.0 (IR4.0), and tremendous improvement in the internet of things (IoT), the application of precision agriculture to pepper farming is a thing to consider for its benefit. This paper to explore the use of IoT to monitor fertilizer requirement for pepper vines using pH sensor. The pH sensor attached to Raspberry Pi 3 will be collecting the data and forwarding it to the cloud database for farmer reference and take decision based on data presented in form of a digital report from the database. The Python environment provides the space for coding in Raspberry Pi. SQL and PHP software is used to design the user interface and data management in the relational database management system. The information about pH provides a better understanding of how pH parameter affects the growth of pepper vines. The farmer will be able to access the information anywhere and anytime. Therefore, our proposed system will greatly help the pepper farmers in Sarawak in managing the usage of fertilizer as a way to minimize farm inputs, thus increase their profit.
During the last quarter of the twentieth century there have been intensive research activities looking for green sources of energy. The main aim of the green generators or converters of energy is to replace the conventional (fossil) energy sources, hence reducing further accumulation of the green house gasses GHGs. Conventional silicon and III-V semiconductor solar cell based on crystalline bulk, quantum well and quantum dots structure or amorphous and thin film structures provided a feasible solution. However, natural dye sensitized solar cells NDSSC are a promising class of photovoltaic cells with the capability of generating green energy at low production cost since no vacuum systems or expensive equipment are required in their fabrication. Also, natural dyes are abundant, easily extracted and safe materials. In NDSSC, once dye molecules exposed to light they become oxidized and transfer electrons to a nanostructured layer of wide bandgap semiconductors such as TiO2. The generated electrons are drawn outside the cell through ohmic contact to a load. In this paper we review the structure and operation principles of the dye sensitized solar cell DSSC. We discuss preparation procedures, optical and electrical characterization of the NDSSC using local dyes extracted from Henna (lawsonia inermis L.), pomegranate, cherries and Bahraini raspberries (rubus spp.). These natural organic dyes are potential candidates to replace some of the man-made dyes used as sensitizer in many commercialized photoelectrochemical cells. Factors limiting the operation of the DSSC are discussed. NDSSCs are expected to be a favored choice in the building-integrated
photovoltaics (BIPV) due to their robustness, therefore, requiring no special shielding from natural events such as tree strikes or hails.
In this study, three potential probiotic strains were selected to ferment blueberry and blackberry juices. The viable cell counts of selected strains were increased by 0.4-0.7 log CFU/mL in berry juices environments after 48-h fermentation. Meanwhile, the contents of cyanindin-3-glucoside and peonidin-3-glucoside decreased over 30%. Heatmap presented an upgrade trend of syringic acid, ferulic acid, gallic acid and lactic acid during fermentation. However, the contents of p-coumaric acid, protocatechuic acid, chlorogenic acid, critic acid and malic acid showed downgrade trend. The metabolism of phenolics probably contributed to the enhancement of the ABTS radical scavenging activity (40%-60%) in fermented berry juices. Moreover, the three strains presented different capacities on changing the quality of berry juices according to the PCA and LDA analysis. The contents of individual organic acids had positive correlations with sensory quality, especially for sourness. Overall, probiotic fermentation could improve the sensory quality of berry juices.