The growing application of smart manufacturing systems and the expansion of the Industry 4.0 model have created a need for new teaching platforms for education, rapid application development, and testing. This research addresses this need with a proposal for a model of working environment monitoring in smart manufacturing, based on emerging wireless sensor technologies and the message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) protocol. In accordance with the proposed model, a testing platform was developed. The testing platform was built on open-source hardware and software components. The testing platform was used for the validation of the model within the presented experimental environment. The results showed that the proposed model could be developed by mainly using open-source components, which can then be used to simulate different scenarios, applications, and target systems. Furthermore, the presented stable and functional platform proved to be applicable in the process of rapid prototyping, and software development for the targeted systems, as well as for student teaching as part of the engineering education process.

The paper proposes a Hybrid Electric Vehicle (HEV) design based on the installation of a fuel cell (FC) module in the existing Daewoo Tico electric vehicle to increase its range in urban areas. Installing an FC module supplied by a 2 kg hydrogen tank would not significantly increase the mass of the electric vehicle, and the charging time of the hydrogen tank is lower than the battery charging time. For design analysis, a model was created in the MATLAB/Simulink software package. The model simulates vehicle range at different HEV speeds for Absorbent Glass Mat (AGM) and Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) power sources. The greatest anticipated benefit derived from the model analysis relates to velocities ranging from 20 km/h to 30 km/h, although the optimal HEV velocity in an urban area is in the range of 30 km/h to 40 km/h. The results indicate that this conversion of Electric Vehicle (EV) to HEV would bring a benefit of 87.4% in terms of vehicle range in urban areas. Therefore, the result of the conversion in this case is a vehicle with sub-optimal characteristics, which are nevertheless very close to optimal.