Development of low cost pyranometer IoT based solar irradiance measurement station

Abstract

This paper presents the design of self-sustainable IoT pyranometer station using low cost BPW34 photodiode. The sustainable power of the station is achieved by a 20W solar panel charges a 7.2Ah lead acid battery through a charge controller. This station uses low cost BPW34 sensors which are connected to a 16-bit ADC module to convert the analog voltage into digital data. This module is connected to an ESP32 microcontroller that connects to Wi-Fi and sends sensor readings to ThingSpeak IoT platform to allow monitoring. This study collected over 36000 data points throughout February 2023 with an average daily data loss of 2.47%. Polynomial regression method was used to determine a best fit curve equation between the BPW34 sensor and the reference sensor. The result shows that the proposed BPW34 sensor achieve the highest error of ±80W/m2 with approximate 3% of daily data. The summary, a second order polynomial equation is found best fit for the proposed low cost BPW34 sensor.