On Using IoT Protocols for Automation and Monitoring Solar Tracker Devices
Abstract
It is known that measurements of long-term solar radiation are climatically, economically and anthropologic important. Moreover, reliable and low uncertainty irradiation measurements are fundamental for assessment of solar system and for improve the bankability of systems. This work describes a compact control system for a solar tracker, which was successfully tested to an Eppley SMT tracker. The control unit uses a single board computer BeagleBone Black, managed by MQTT IoT network protocol and azimuth and zenith angles are estimated by NREL's SPA algorithm. Since the goal is to reduce the number of problems related to the measurements, mainly to the miss alignment, we proposed a supervisory system, composed by web monitoring, alarms, cameras, databases, time-lapses videos, among other possible services. The supervisory system is simple to implement and uses Grafana, that allows to obtain, visualize data and quality control, alert and understand any metrics independent of the type of storage. Keywords: Solar tracker control unit, IoT, supervisory system, single board computer.