Remote monitoring system development via Raspberry-Pi for small scale standalone PV plant

The rapid growth of renewable energy such as photovoltaic (PV) system has triggered the idea to create a low-cost monitoring system involving different types of integration. Currently, remote monitoring has attracted people interest with graphical data that display in real time system instead of numerical data. However, most of the monitoring systems are too expensive and cable connected where all the data are transmitted via local area network (LAN) connection or fibre optic. Thus, in this paper, a low cost monitoring system is developed by employing the use of a Raspberry Pi microcontroller to remotely monitor the performance of a small scale standalone solar PV system. The monitoring system is able to acquire, store and display solar PV parameters such as voltage, current and ambient temperature in real time. The measured parameters are displayed and act as a virtual monitoring system by using the graphical user interface (GUI) that provided in Node.js. Hence, with this remote monitoring system, solar PV analysis can be done in real-time with low cost implementation. Furthermore, this remotely monitoring system allows the flexibility of system to be extended with bigger scale of PV plant.