A GSM Based Intelligent Solar Energy Measuring System

A Photovoltaic (PV) power monitoring is important in PV systems for proper generation and transmission. With the need to monitor certain parameters like voltage, current and power in order to ascertain the power output of a solar system. In this project design, a GSM solar power monitoring system is designed in order to monitor the voltage, current and output power of a solar system and also transmit the monitored parameters in real time to a remote location via the SMS feature of the GSM technology. An 8 bit 18F452 PIC microcontroller is used as the control unit which controls the Pulse width Modulation (PWM) solar charge controller, IRF3205 MOSFETs as the switching transistors in the charge controller charging a 30AH 12v battery via a 30watts polycrystalline solar panel. Universal asynchronous synchronous receiver and transmitter (USART) is used as protocol for transmission between a Sim 900 GSM module and the microcontroller while the attention (AT) command is used as the communication protocol in sending measured power parameters from the microcontroller to the GSM module which in turn sends the measured parameters as SMS message to a remote location. ACS 712 hall effect current sensor for measuring current and a voltage divider network for measuring the PV cell voltage. The circuit board is printed on a Printed circuit board (PCB) using the traditional transfer method. C programming language is used in writing program codes embedded on the controller. This project design have been able to show that by employing the use of a wireless real time data monitoring (GSM technology), PV systems can be properly monitored remotely for consumption, operation, analysis and isolation in cases of fault detection.