Development of microcontroller based portable solar irradiance meter using mini solar cell

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to design and develop a portable solar irradiance meter which allows the users to measure the real-time solar irradiance. The measuring device used a solar cell as the main sensor in order to convert solar energy into electrical energy. The actual solar irradiance will be measured and displayed on the LCD. The project used a microcontroller to obtain and process the output parameters from the solar cell. In addition, the developed devices also provide ambient temperature in real-time. Based on experiment, the developed system showed the accuracy more than 90% which is the overall error less than 10%.