“Solar energy is the future of energy industry. The countries all around the world are focusing towards renewable and clean sources of energy. The sunlight is the most abundant resource available everywhere and each day. By generating energy using sunlight, the electricity generation can be done without any pollution. There are continuous research and innovations going on to improve the efficiency of solar cells, reduce cost of manufacturing solar panels and improving power distribution from solar plants.
The aim of the project is to improve the efficiency of solar panels. The project is designed to supervise solar photovoltaic power generation to enhance the performance, monitoring and maintenance of the solar plant. With advancement of technologies the cost of renewable energy equipment is going down globally encouraging large scale solar photovoltaic installations. This massive scale of solar photovoltaic deployment requires sophisticated systems for automation of the plant monitoring remotely using web based interfaces as majority of them are installed in inaccessible locations and therefore are easy to be monitored from a dedicated location. The project allows monitoring power output of a solar panel, incident light intensity and the operating temperature.
In this project, the particle photon is interfaced with the voltage output pin of the solar panel, LM-35 temperature sensor and LDR sensor to monitor the power output, temperature and the incident light intensity respectively. A character LCD is also interfaced to the particle photon for real time display of the measured parameters. The Photon not only displays the measured parameters on the LCD screen, but also sends the measured values to the cloud server. For viewing the real-time data and logs sent by the board, the user needs to log in to the registered account from the Particle’s official website.”