Energy Harvest & Monitor on AzureCloud (EHMC)

Let's Start

Recent demand for Solar Energy has made me focus on converting my tiny conventional 50w Solar Power kit into cloud enabled Energy Harvest & Monitor system. This is the driving factor featuring the Secure Azure Sphere has the main controller in the project.

Design Requirements

A Conventional solar power kit includes a PV solar panel (about 50watt in my case), a solar controlled charger with terminals for connecting solar module, battery and two Loads. My requirement in case of a cloud enabled kit will cover two scenarios.

Firstly, To Know the state of the system by monitoring the following parameters,

1) Voltage & Current rating from solar panel which depends on day-light factors.

2) Voltage & Current rating of battery to find out charge state and expected backup.

3) Current rating of connected load and ability to operate it (Switch ON/OFF) from cloud.

Secondly, to perform predictive maintenance based on the available data from various sensors. These information includes the following

1) Need for cleaning the solar panel surface based on air-quality for a period of time in order to improve the efficiency of the system.

2) Evaluating the Solar power harvest parameters like generated voltage and current to identify efficiency issues irrespective of climatic conditions

3) Monitor for battery health is a must criteria to keep the overall system healthy.

4) Connected loads can be predicted for its normal operations with the relay status and actual current consumption. Any abnormalities can be predicted in advance to keep the system available 24x7.

About My Cloud Enabled EHMC

System consist of consist of couple of Voltage and current sensor which primarily monitors the essential parameters of the existing system without disturbing it the schema of conventional system. These voltage and current sensors are connected in parallel / series with the solar panel, battery and other connected loads. But the sensing signal is handled by the Arduino UNO board in its Analog input pins (A0 to A5). Arduino UNO talks to Azure Sphere throught UART.

How AzureSphere and Arduino Talks - The Connection and Algorithm Behind

1) Arduino is set to communicate with AzureSphere through two serial ports. One through Rx - Pin 0 (hardware serial port) and other through Tx - pin 3 (Software defined serial port). This is done to overcome the auto echo feature in hardware serial port.

2) In the AzureSphere side, arduino's Rx & Tx pins are connected to Tx & Rx UART pins of microbus-1 socket with exact baud rate and flowcontrol as specified in Arduino.

3) When AzureSphere is ready for pushing the data to Azure cloud, it sends a 'READY' request to Arduino UNO. Arduino on receiving this message, sends data of all the sensors which is frequently collected and kept ready for pushing to AzureSphere.

4) AzureSphere on receiving the data, pushes the sensor data to Azure IoT Central Cloud for remote monitoring and further processing towards predictive maintenance & notification.

That's all the simple story involved in the process. Let's move to further detailed explanations.