Today, we will be looking at some home-made project, A DIY for tech-bluffs. We will dive a bit into programming and emmbeded system designs and we will copying off a work from Smartech. In today’s post, we will be building an Internet of Things (IoT) solar panel remote monitoring system using an Arduino board, a voltage sensor, and the Blynk IoT dashboard. By the end of this tutorial, we will have successfully measured the voltage output of a PV (solar) panel and then sent that data in real time to a remote dashboard on the Blynk server, where it can be accessed from anywhere around the globe
Go through this post to learn more about measuring the voltage of a solar panel.
Materials Needed
- Arduino Uno
- Voltage Sensor
- Solar panel 21.5V VoC, 20W
- ESP8266-01
- ESP8266 -12E (Optional)
All these components can be bought on their online store. Alternatively, all the previous written tutorials on voltage measurements of PV are already detailed here. Read up more on this this link. Let us proceed to how to hook this up to an Arduino Uno board, connect the ESP8266-01 WiFi module to it and send the data to cloud server of Blynk.
The Circuit Diagram of Solar Panel Remote Monitoring System
The ESP8266-01 (ESP-01) module is a small inexpensive WiFi module that is capable of host Access Point (A.P) and connecting to a server (STA mode). We connected this according to the diagram above. More details of the pin out diagram is shown below.
The ESP-01 uses 3.3V logic level. But it also required more current that the normal Arduino 3.3V port can provide. We however tried this and it worked but sometimes when there are other loads it may disturb it. It is usually wise to give it a stable 3.3V supply.
Setting Up the Blynk IoT Dashboard
Explanation of circuit diagram
The circuit diagram for 3.3V, 5V, 9V, 12V and 24V uses the same source code (Arduino Sketch) given below. The battery level can be increased from 3.3V to 24V. and connected as shown above. Once this was done, connect the Arduino uno board to the Personal Computer (PC), power up the Arduino IDE and copy the sketch given below.
The Source Code (Arduino Sketch)
Result and Explanation
The serial monitor printing show that We can Measure or take the reading of our DC Voltage reading via the Analog pins on the Arduino, using the Serial Monitor on the Arduino IDE. Depending on the Power supply (which are mostly DC Voltage connected to the Output of the Voltage Sensor).
