The Rise of BREAD: Leveraging Open-Source Process Control

Industrial pilot projects and the automation of experiments often rely on expensive and proprietary electronic hardware, known as supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, to control and monitor areas of their processes. The Broadly Reconfigurable and Expandable Automation Device (BREAD) framework was created to address the need for inexpensive SCADA systems. New BREAD Slices were designed and compared to commercial heating, motor, pump, and pH controllers, exceeding all in functionality and cost. In each case, the decreased accuracy of the BREAD controller had little impact on the final products but greatly reduced the cost of the system. The modularity of BREAD was also desirable in situations where control zones were constantly changing, like the heating zones of a pyrolysis reactor. After improving the design to better meet the needs of a SCADA system, BREADv2 was integrated into an enclosure demonstrating its potential as a backbone for pH controllers.