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The increasing demand of comfort levels in the home area stimulates the development of systems to reach several goals. Some features of this kind of systems are: energy savings, environmental control, safety monitoring, remote definition of the system set points, etc. This kind of systems is made up of several units spread in the target areas of the house where they are implemented. Those units communicate between them and the master stations through different sort of links: cable, radio frequency, optical fibre, power line, etc. Also, they can use different kind of communications protocols like: Controller Area Network (CAN), Profibus, Bitbus, user defined, etc. To implement the mentioned systems there are a large quantity of devices, furnished from several chip manufacturers. For example, T exas Instruments as Digital Signal Processors (DSP) that have embedded CAN modules to allow easy and powerful solutions like for instance the improving of motor control applications using the above-mentioned communication protocol. This paper describe a CAN based system that uses a DSP Controller and allows the control of several actuation/acquisition devices that form a flexible, robust and easy maintained Domotic network.

The layout of the factories in the apparel industry has several processing stations that are grouped in sections that have to do with a particular task (ex. trousers stitch). This together with high levels of production capacity demands the implementation of automatic monitoring systems that allow some sort of feedback related with the production progress of those stations. This paper describes a system that is being developed at Escola Superior de Tecnologia de Castelo Branco, which is part of the Instituto Politécnico de Castelo Branco. It consists of a prototype for a real time data pick up system, using the Controller Area Network (CAN) [1] bus. The aimed objective is to collect the data contained in bar code labels that are coupled to cloths pieces in an apparel factory during the production process. Those labels have useful information to the production stage (ID number of the piece), and accompany each apparel piece. This system is part of a more global system that will allow the production management using a wed platform linking the commercial, production scheduling, manufacturing control and customer/seller stages.