Design and Performance Evaluation of a Microcontroller-Based Automatic Control System with Scenario-Based Embedded Control Assessment

• Hidayatul Falahiyah Ats Tsabitah

  Universitas Negeri Malang

  Penulis

This paper presents a reviewer-oriented design and performance evaluation of a microcontroller-based automatic control system for simple environmental regulation. Instead of treating the prototype as a basic sensor-actuator demonstration, the proposed system is structured as a measurable embedded control node consisting of sensing, signal conditioning, ADC conversion, scheduled control execution, actuator driving, data logging, and safety supervision. Four control scenarios are compared: threshold relay control, hysteresis control, PI-PWM control, and PI-PWM control under disturbance. Because no physical prototype dataset was supplied, a transparent prototype-level simulated dataset is used to illustrate the evaluation workflow and to define the performance metrics that should be validated experimentally. The results show that PI-PWM control reduced settling time from 322 s to 176 s, corresponding to a 45.3% improvement relative to threshold control, and reduced steady-state error from 1.28 °C to 0.24 °C. Hysteresis control reduced relay switching from 46 to 12 events per hour, while PI-PWM eliminated mechanical relay cycling in the simulated actuation model. Energy use decreased from 18.6 Wh under threshold control to 14.2 Wh under PI-PWM control. These findings indicate that the scientific value of a simple microcontroller automation system depends less on the microcontroller board itself and more on the quality of the control strategy, performance metrics, and validation protocol. The main contribution is a structured methodology for transforming a simple microcontroller project into a reproducible, data-driven embedded control study.

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