“The proposed IoT solution can be employed in various fields to connect devices or things to the internet.
This project presents a simple and low-cost IoT solution to monitor and control a smart dual-axis solar tracker system for performance evaluation.
The proposed IoT-based solar tracker system is depicted in Fig. 1. It is a dual-axis solar tracker that can rotate automatically to track the sun’s position using LDR sensors, or manually by the user through the dashboard of an IoT application. The system starts with detects the sun position (intensity of light) by LDR sensors and sends the data to the controller (Arduino Mega board). This latter then processes these data to command servomotors (SM1 and SM2) that hold the PV panel to rotate toward the sun. The values of the generated PV voltage and current, temperature and humidity are also sent to the Arduino through associated sensors. Next, the Ethernet shield, which is mounted with Arduino and allows it to be connected to the Internet, will send the data that have been taking and/or processed by Arduino to the cloud (webserver). Lastly, the solar tracker data, including LDR sensors, PV power, temperature and humidity, are displayed in real-time in the IoT monitoring application via pre-created widgets. The IoT monitoring application is designed using Cayenne myDevicesplatform. Once the user is connected to the internet from his computer or smartphone, he can visualize, in the dashboard of the IoT application, all solar tracker data in their associated widgets. Therefore, the user has the necessary data linked to the environment and performance of the PV panel. In addition, in the manual mode, the servomotors will take angle directions from their associated widgets in the dashboard. Hence, the user can control his system to seek the best environmental conditions and extract the maximum energy from the PV panel. The IoT application is also programmed to send notification alerts (SMS or Email) when a senor reaches a predefined threshold value.”