Experimental Installation of Photovoltaic MPPT Controller Using Arduino Board

Nowadays, several electronic devices as field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) and dSPACE controllers are used to implement the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) for the photovoltaic (PV) systems applications. In contrast, the PIC microcontrollers are recommended to be used due to its low cost and simplicity compared with the other hardware devices. In this paper, the Arduino microcontroller is used to validate the function of perturb and observe (P&O) MPPT controller used with a stand-alone PV system under constant climate conditions and step variations in the connected load. From the comparison of experimental and simulation results, the available maximum power of the solar panel is successfully extracted by using Arduino Uno board irrespective of the variable load conditions.