Development of Self Sustainable IOT Based Low Cost UV Index Monitoring Station

Ultraviolet exists in our daily life as Sun is the major source of ultraviolet. Although ultraviolet is undetectable with bare eyes, but it does bring effect to our health and product lifetime under long exposure of strong ultraviolet radiation. This paper presented the development of ultraviolet index monitoring station which consisted of a low cost analogue breakout module integrated with an ultraviolet sensor, GUVA-S12SD, a wireless fidelity embedded microcontroller, NodeMCU-ESP8266, solar photovoltaic system for self sustainability of the station and a large display made of two seven segment light-emitting diode. The ultraviolet index monitoring station was connected to the internet and the ultraviolet data were sent to an Internet of Things platform, ThingSpeak for public access. The ultraviolet index monitoring station was setup and tested at a residential area. The ultraviolet data collected were analysed and validated using external reference source from the Meteorological Department, Malaysia which located at a radius distance of 6 km from the data collection site. Lastly, a fitting equation was derived to determine the ultraviolet index value. The ultraviolet results showed a promising accuracy with a low mean error of 1.31 and which close to the reference ultraviolet index provided by Meteorological Department, Malaysia. Furthermore, this paper performed study to the ultraviolet sensor breakout module which contributed to development of the ultraviolet measuring instrument. The ultraviolet index monitoring system also contributes to monitor ultraviolet index in a local area such as community park, beach, field and school to raise the public awareness.