Vocational education needs to be transformed to cultivate talents with diverse fusion competencies, which is in line with the recent changes that have become a part of the complex technological developments in the 4th Industrial Revolution. Therefore, it is very important for college graduates to obtain employment skills as they are required to prepare for careers within the complex environments of future societies. With the transition to the Internet of Things (IoT)-based control in the manufacturing industry, the development of technological education and related training programs is required to cultivate practical talents for students who have acquired not only the information on existing programmable logic controller (PLC)-based technology, but also that on embedded programming technology. Therefore, to develop an NCS-based education program for analog signal processing to ensure that programming can easily be learned for cultivating practical talent, this study summarizes the opinions of field experts, selects the appropriate NCS competency unit, and designs an adequate technology education training program.

Small-scale production control systems for smart manufacturing are becoming increasingly necessary as the manufacturing industry seeks to maximize manufacturing efficiency as the demand for customized product production increases. Correspondingly, the development of an embedded system to realize this capability is becoming important. In this study, we developed an embedded system based on an open source system that is cheaper than a widely applied programmable logic controller (PLC)-based production control system that is easier to install, configure, and process than a conventional relay control panel. This embedded system is system is based on a low-power, high-performance Cortex M4 processor and can be applied to smart manufacturing. It is designed to improve the development environment and compatibility of existing PLCs, control small-scale production systems, and enable data collection through heterogeneous communication. The real-time response characteristics were confirmed through an operation test for input/output control and data collection, and it was confirmed that they can be used in industrial sites.