A smart photovoltaic system with Internet of Thing: A case study of the smart agricultural greenhouse

Abstract

© 2018 IEEE. This research aims to prototype a portable, small, smart, and off-grid photovoltaic system to provide an alternative electrical supply for a smart agricultural greenhouse. This research applied the use of internet of things technology to retrieve the photovoltaic system status (photovoltaic voltage and ampere, battery voltage, and battery current loading) from the MPPT charger controller. All photovoltaic system status data is processed through Blynk. Blynk has been developed as an internet of things cloud service. Data is stored into Blynk and displayed on mobile devices in real time. The status of the battery of the device (full or empty) pushes notifications through inbox message on the Facebook application by IFTTT (if this then that) service. Historical data could be retrieved as CSV files. The equipment and tools used in this research are ESP8266 module, the photovoltaic system with the MPPT charger controller, DC water pumps. The programming used is C++ on ESP8266 module. A small off-grid photovoltaic system is applied. It consists of a MPPT (Maximum Power Point Tracking) charger controller, battery, and photovoltaic panels. The internet of things cloud used is Blynk. The results of the research show that using internet of things with an MPPT charger controller enhances the prototype of smart farming as an alternative and green electrical resource.