2018 International Conference on Applied Smart Systems (ICASS'2018)
24-25 November 2018, Médéa, ALGERIA
IoT-based experimental prototype for monitoring of
photovoltaic arrays
A. Hamied
Faculty of Science and Technology, Renewable energy Laboratory, Jijel
Electronics Department, Jijel University University 18000, Algeria
18000, Algeria
elfarouk3@gmail.com
Abstract— In this paper a smart prototype has been designed
for monitoring of PV arrays using Internet of Things (IoT). An
electronic sensing board has been designed. A website application
has been also developed in order to monitor the data online
(electrical PV array current and voltage, air temperature and
solar irradiance). The designed prototype has been verified
experimentally at Renewable Energy Laboratory in Jijel
University (Algeria). Experimental results showed the capability
of the prototype to monitor the data without using additional
circuits and efforts. The prototype could be used for fault
detection (FD) in PV arrays by integrating for example a FD
algorithm.
Keywords—Photovoltaic array, monitoring, IoT, fault detection.
I. INTRODUCTION
The photovoltaic (PV) market has seen over the last years a
remarkable growth as a result of various stimulating factors:
the significant cost reduction of the PV modules on the
market and the changes on support policies. These factors
have make the return on investment of a photovoltaic system
more interesting [1]. Monitoring systems (MS) are essential for
supervising, controlling and performing fault detection (FD) of
PV systems, therefore many MSs have been recently designed
aiming to perform a real-time monitoring of PV systems
(PVSs)[ 2].
Internet of Thing (IoT) simply can be defined as a concept
which permits communicating different equipment to each
other using Internet or others networks, without human
interaction. The first clear vision of IoT was firstly introduced
in 1999 [3]. The main idea is to connect all devices, systems
and services to share data between these elements. Actually, it
is well known that IoT allows objects to be sensed and/or
controlled remotely over existing network infrastructure,
making opportunities for pure integration of the physical world
into computer-based systems, and the main advantages are:
accuracy and efficiency improvement as well as economic
benefit, and the most advantage is to reduce human
intervention[4]. The main application around the world are:
IoT - connectivity and new business models, smart homes,
smart cities, healthcare Industry, etc.
The application of IoT in solar energy PV systems is
recently started, for example in [4] a solar energy MS using IoT
This work was partially supported by the ICTP, Trieste, Italy
978-1-5386-6866-5/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE
A. Mellit MA. Zoulid and R.Birouk
Faculty of Science and Technology
Renewable energy laboratory, Jijel
amellit@ictp.it University, Jijel 18000, Algeria
has been designed, in this application the authors used a
Raspberry PI and thinkSpeak of MathWorks to monitor the
data of the designed system. An on-line IoT based remote
monitoring system for PV arrays is proposed in [5], and a fault
diagnosis approach, based on extreme learning machine, is
studied. The proposed system consists of data acquisition, data
gateway and PVMC website. Data acquisition part successfully
collect data and transmit them to data gateway, the data
gateway also capture video and acquire position information
then upload them to PVMC website for supervision. A
smart solar PV remote MS and control unit using IoT was
developed in [6]. With reference to the authors, the designed
system facilitated preventive maintenance, historical analysis of
the plant, as well as real time monitoring and FD.
In [7] an effective implementation of an intelligent remote
monitoring system for solar PV Power Conditioning Unit
(PCU), presented. The designed system could be installed in
solar PV-PCU in order to solve management problems,
maintenance and shortens the mean time to repair. According
to the authors the result shows that the system can monitor,
store and manipulate data from solar PV-PCU. Consequently,
the remote monitoring functions are realized in real-time. In [8]
the authors discussed a low IoT based embedded solar PV MS,
GPRS module and low cost MC were used. A sensor network
based on IoT for a robust and complex short-time (ST)
prediction system of the power output from photovoltaic
modules was presented in [9], and the results demonstrated the
ability of the designed approach for ST-prediction.
The main objective of this work is to design a low-cost
prototype for monitoring electrical and climate data of a PV
array (such as PV array current, PV array voltage, air
temperature and solar irradiance) in real time. Two sensing
electronic circuits based on the Arduino Mega 2560 have been
developed. IoT technology is used to transmit the monitored
data on the internet using a Wi-Fi module ESP-01, as well as
we have developed a website to store and display the monitored
data in real time.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows, Section II
describes more details about the methodology and materials.
Results and discussion are reported in Section III. The last
section reports some concluding remarks.
2018 International Conference on Applied Smart Systems (ICASS'2018)
24-25 November 2018, Médéa, ALGERIA

II. METHODOLOGY AND MATERIALS B. Experimental setup

The experimental setup of the proposed system consists of a
A. System description PV string (three PV modules connected in parallel), voltage
The investigated stand-alone photovoltaic system (SAPVS) transducer, and current transducer and Arduino Mega
is installed at Renewable energy laboratory in Jijel University microcontroller. Programming codes and visualization of data
(See fig.1). It consists of 18 PV modules, 12 storage batteries, are carried out on a designed website.
two regulators and an inverter (See Fig.1a). However, in this The used components are presented in the following Table
paper we just monitor the data from a PV array (string of three II:
modules in parallel). The investigated PV module
specifications are reported in Table I. TABLE II THE EMPLOYED COMPONENTS
Component Specifications Cost
Current sensor ACS712 1400DA
(Imax=30A)
Voltage sensor DC<25V 700DA
Temperature sensor LM335 200DA
Reference solar cell Isofoton 2000DA
Arduino mga2560 ATMEGA256 3500DA
board 016AU1738
Wi-Fi module ESP-01 1000DA
LCD LCD16x4 800DA
Fig.1a A stand-alone PV system installed at the roof top of Renewable energy
Lab at Jijel University
C. Circuit design and implementation
TABLE I PV MODULE SPECIFICATIONS ( PV MSX- 120) Fig.3a and 3b show respectively the test facility at RELab
and the designed prototype. The acquisition board consists of
Maximum power 121.4 W an Arduino Mega 2560 microcontroller used to recovered
Maximum voltage 17.1 V analog data from the detection circuits. A 16x4 LCD display is
Maximum current 7.11 A used to show the system status and monitored data in real time.
Short circuit current 7.98 A An ESP-01 Wi-Fi module for data transmission to host PC is
employed, as the ESP-01 operates with 3.3 V, Diatone's BEC-
Open circuit voltage 21.2 V
MINI-3.3V voltage regulator is used to reduce the supply
voltage to 3.3V. A resistance of 5Ohm is used to measure the
Figure 1b illustrates the measured I-V and P-V curves using PV array current.
Prova210 I-V tracer.

6
P V m odule current(A )

0
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18

60
P V m odule power(W )

40

20
Fig.3a. Test facility at REL, Jijel University.
0
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18
PV module voltage(V)

Fig.1b Measured I-V and P-V curves for one PV module PV-MSX120
(Voc=16.78, Isc=5.31, Vmpp=11.97, Impp=4.71, FF=0.63, T=24 degree C,
G=734 W/m2 )
 2018 International Conference on Applied Smart Systems (ICASS'2018)
24-25 November 2018, Médéa, ALGERIA

Fig.3b The designed monitoring prototype

The estimated cost of the designed prototype is about

11000DA, including all used components, (about 75 Euro).

D. Transmission techniques
In literature, numerous transmission techniques can be used
for monitoring purpose, such as Ethernet network and Zigbee
wireless network. In this paper ESP-01 Wi-Fi module is used
for monitoring data of a PV array. The implemented code into
the Arduino Mega board is developed using Arduino IDE and
the procedure of the process is shown as:

Step 1: LCD and ESP-01 initialization

Step 2: Test ? if the ESP-01 is ready, if OK
Step 3: Connect ESP-01 to router
Step 4: Test ? is ESP-01 is connected, if OK
Step 5: Read V, I G and T
Display the results on LCD
Create a TCP connection and HTTP
Step 6: Close the connection TCP to web, loop to stage 5
It can be seen that the process starts with the initialization
of the LCD panel and Wi-Fi module ESP-01. After that
initialization, and then the microcontroller waits for the ESP-01
to be ready. If the ESP-01 is ready, it will connect
automatically to the router. The monitored data will be read,
saved as strings and displayed on the LCD. For data
transmission, ESP-01 will create a TCP connection to the
server.
Fig.3 The designed Webpage
The recorded data are posted into the designed Web site,
and Figs 4(a-d) displays the evolution of the monitored data via
IoT at 1min time scale (Oct 18th 2018), during a period of three
hours 10:30-13:30.
As can be seen from the Fig.4d, at the 28th minute we have
a rapid variation of solar irradiance, the duration is less than 1
minute, so the designed prototype cannot detect this variation
(see Fig.4a and Fib.4b) as the sample is set at 1 min, however,
between 40th and 60th minute in which the sky is more cloudy
and take about 7 minutes, the system can easly detect this
variation as traduced by a reduction in PV currant and voltage
output. This is not a fault, but if no variation in solar irradiation
and we got the same PV array courant and voltage in this case
we need to check the PV array.

III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

Experiments result have been carried out at Jijel University
(Jijel location is characterized by a moderate weather). After
the successful connection to the server, the data from the PV
array have been sent to the cloud for data monitoring of the PV
array. By entering the assigned IP address in the web browser,
the following web server page (See Fig.3) will appear. It shows
the developed web page for monitoring PV array current, PV
array voltage, solar irradiance and air temperature.
2018 International Conference on Applied Smart Systems (ICASS'2018)
24-25 November 2018, Médéa, ALGERIA

IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper a low cost prototype used to monitor data from
a PV array has been designed. Recorded data has been sent to
the cloud via IoT for online monitoring of a PV array.
The experimental results demonstrate that the developed
monitoring system provide users with web-based interface, in
which users can browse the real-time PV array data such as PV
array current, PV array voltage, air temperature and solar
irradiance. The main advantages of this project are: human
intervention is significantly reduced, real time monitoring and
historical data analysis, low cost and easy implementation.
This work can be further improved and extended for fault
detection in photovoltaic systems [10]. The designed website
also could be enhanced in order to display and indicate any
fault that could be occurred on the PV systems.

14.5 30

29

28
14
Air temperatute (Degree C)
27
PV string voltage (V)

26
13.5

25

24
13
23

22
12.5
21

20 (c)100 120
12 0 20 40 60 80 140 160 180 200
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200 time (min)
time (min)

(a)
650
7.4
600
7.2
550

7 500
Solar irradiance (W/m 2)
PV string current (A)

450
6.8
400

6.6 350

300
6.4
250
6.2
200

6 150
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200
time (min) time (min)
(d)
(b)

Fig.4a-d. Monitored data via IoT( PV array voltage, PV array current, air temperature, solar irradiance within 3 hours on 18/09/2018 at Jijel
university, Algeria
2018 International Conference on Applied Smart Systems (ICASS'2018)
24-25 November 2018, Médéa, ALGERIA
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