Innovation in Smart Sensor Technology for Automated Palm Sugar Cooking Control to Improve Production and Sales at Harapan Palm Sugar Producers

Palm sugar is an important natural sweetener produced by many small-scale home industries in Indonesia. However, conventional cooking processes rely heavily on manual observation, resulting in inconsistent temperature and viscosity control, inefficient energy utilization, and variations in product quality. This study aims to develop an Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart sensor system that integrates temperature and viscosity measurements for real-time monitoring and automatic control of the palm sugar cooking process. An applied experimental engineering approach was employed, consisting of requirement analysis, hardware and software development, sensor calibration, system integration, laboratory testing, and field evaluation at a partner home industry. The proposed system integrates a DS18B20 temperature sensor, viscosity sensor, ESP32 microcontroller, automatic heating controller, and web-based monitoring platform. Experimental results showed an average temperature measurement error of 0.26% and viscosity measurement error of 0.98%. The IoT communication system achieved a 99.2% successful data transmission rate with an average delay of 1.9 s. Compared with the conventional process, cooking time decreased from 122 to 101 min, fuel consumption decreased from 20 to 16 kg per production cycle, temperature stability increased from 72% to 96%, and defective products decreased from 12% to 3%. These results demonstrate that integrating temperature and viscosity sensing with automatic IoT-based control improves process stability, energy efficiency, and product consistency. However, the study was limited by single-site field validation and predefined control thresholds. Future research will focus on adaptive control using machine learning or fuzzy logic, multi-site validation, cloud analytics, and mobile notification features to improve system scalability and intelligence.