Remote monitoring system for distributed photovoltaic based on ZigBee

In distributed photovoltaic systems, solar panels are placed in adequate lighting place, for example civil roof, which leads to the difficulty of monitoring. In this paper, we present a monitoring system to observe the stability and performance of the photovoltaic by data analysis. For solar cells, there are some data collectors, which will be connected to specific ZigBee devices to transmit the monitoring data to web server. The collected data will be analyzed and presented by web server. Specific users can monitor the data on mobile phones and personal computers through data releasing on web page by Ajax and Html (the Hypertext Markup Language) technology. In the process, the open source Linux operating system has been selected as the development platform, on which the open source BOA is deployed as web server. In the process of data transmitting, a simple and effective data protocol is adopted to evaluate the system performance. Through the remote monitoring, a lot of human and material sources are saved. Experiments show that ZigBee networking is an ideal solution to distributed solar cells monitoring and the monitoring system runs effectively.