Development of cost effective charge controller with data acquisition options for PV powered sensor nodes

This paper presents a cost efficient PV charge controller module combined with data logging and transmitting options, suitable for monitoring PV panel voltage-current as well as switching to the load for remote monitoring applications (e.g. environmental data acquisition for smart agriculture) of wireless sensor network. To increase the life time of a sensor node, recharge cycle of the storage battery is optimized. Here, the storage battery will not be charged randomly even though solar power is available in the PV panel, rather it is charged while discharge quantity reaches to user defined threshold limit and the rest of the power will be used for other applications. This paves the way to increase the storage battery life time by reducing the recharge cycle. Here, a more powerful PIC microcontroller is used for the enhancement of complete sensor node solution for environmental monitoring application such as for smart agriculture. Nonetheless, cost can be further reduced by optimizing hardware for particular devices of specific applications with the same methodology narrated in this paper.