MICROCONTROLLER BASED STANDALONE PV SYSTEM FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NODE

Abstract:
This paper puts forth a study integrating the Solar panel power monitoring, the charge controller as well as switching options for remote monitoring applications. To increase the life time of a battery node, recharge cycle is optimized in such a way that the battery is not charged randomly even though sunlight is available on solar panel, rather it is charged while discharge reaches to a certain predefined limit. Thus, it increases the storage battery life time by reducing the recharge cycle. Here, an AT 89C51 microcontroller is used for future enhancement of a complete battery node solution in a wireless sensor node for environmental monitoring application. However, cost-efficiency can be obtained by selecting optimum hardware for particular device of specific applications with the same methodology described in this paper.

The Proposed System:
The system proposed here presents a refined battery charging control system. Current designs did not meet our goals in terms of cost, ease-of-use, and remote monitoring. Ideally, system design should have the least components from an ease-of-use and integration in cost standpoint. Solar harvesting technology provides the ability to extract energy from the environment; it should be efficiently integrated into an embedded system to translate that harvested energy into increased application performance and system lifetime.