Low-cost and reliable wireless communication system for monitoring a photovoltaic source

Author

Hincapie, Diana M. ; Duarte, Gabriel G. ; Sepulveda, Sergio B.

Author_Institution

Dept. de Electr. y Electron., Univ. Francisco de Paula Santander, Cucuta, Colombia

fYear

2015

fDate

13-15 May 2015

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

5

Abstract

This paper presents a wireless communications system that was used to monitor a photovoltaic source. Basically, the microcontroller-based Data Acquisition card measures solar radiation from a pyranometer and energy produced by the PV source through an energy meter. These data is transmitted in a wireless channel at 2.4 GHz by using low-cost and low-power consumption RF modules. In the monitoring room, another electronic card, based on microcontroller, RF module and USB interface, receives the data and then the information is stored in a local database. A Java user interface was developed to access the data from a PC. We ran speed and BER tests to demonstrate the reliability of the proposed system. As a result, we obtained a bit rate of 26.73 Kbps and a Bit Error Rate (BER) of 0.5%.

Keywords

data acquisition; error statistics; photovoltaic power systems; power meters; power system measurement; solar radiation; wireless channels; BER tests; Java user interface; RF modules; USB interface; bit error rate; energy meter; frequency 2.4 GHz; microcontroller-based data acquisition; photovoltaic source monitoring; pyranometer; solar radiation; wireless channel; wireless communication system; Biomedical monitoring; Bit error rate; GSM; Monitoring; Universal Serial Bus; Zigbee; Radio-Frequency; Wireless communication system; energy; microcontroller; monitoring; solar radiation; transceiver;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Communications and Computing (COLCOM), 2015 IEEE Colombian Conference on

Conference_Location

Popayan

Print_ISBN

978-1-4799-1760-0

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ColComCon.2015.7152088

Filename

7152088