An Open-Source Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition Architecture for Photovoltaic System Monitoring Using ESP32, Banana Pi M4, and Node-RED

Abstract

To overcome the issues of the existing properties and the non-configurable supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) architecture, this paper proposes an IoT-centered open-source SCADA system for monitoring photovoltaic (PV) systems. The system consists of three voltage sensors and three current sensors for data accumulation from the PV panel, the battery, and the load. As a part of the system design, a relay is used that controls the load remotely. An ESP32-E microcontroller transmits the collected data to a Banana Pi M4 Berry (BPI-M4 Berry) through the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol over a privately established communication channel using Wi-Fi. The ESP32-E is configured as the MQTT publisher and the BPI-M4 Berry serves as the MQTT broker. Locally installed on the BPI-M4 Berry, the Node-RED platform creates highly customizable dashboards as human–machine interfaces (HMIs) to achieve real-time monitoring of the PV system. The proposed system was successfully tested to collect the PV system voltage/current/power data and to control the load in a supervisory way under a laboratory setup. The complete SCADA architecture details and test results for the PV system data during the total eclipse on 8 April 2024 and another day are presented in this paper.