A LoRaWAN Based Solar PV Condition Monitoring System

This paper presents the design and performance of a low-cost, low-power remote condition monitoring (CM) solution for large-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) systems. The developed CM solution utilises ESP-NOW and Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) wireless communication protocols for data exchanges. The developed solution operates in self-power mode, with each IoT node capable of monitoring up to 16 channels of voltage, current, and temperature of the PV panels. The 2.4GHz ESP-NOW wireless communication protocol is used for data transfer between the IoT nodes in a many-to-one configuration. The transceiver node stores messages from all IoT nodes and broadcasts them via the LoRaWAN network to the server. The developed hardware and software solutions were tested to measure the accuracy and reliability of the CM system. As a result, a fully-functioning low-cost solar PV CM system is developed, with an overall sensor measurement error of less than 3%, with an average Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) of -105dBm in non-line-of-sight conditions.