Data Acquisition and Visualization for Solar Power Battery using IoT Open Source Stack Solution

Abstract

Battery energy storage systems have been broadly used in solar power systems. It plays some important roles in solar power systems. Therefore, battery performance estimation becomes a critical task. Since long-term battery voltage data can estimate the battery’s state-of-health and its degradation more precisely, a data acquisition system necessary to be developed in order to collect its data for further study. This research focuses on the development of a data acquisition system for collecting battery voltage and its room temperature and humidity data of the solar power system. The data collection is conducted through the internet-of-things (IoT) platform. An ESP8266 Node Micro-Controller Unit controller board with a DHT11 sensor is used for the basis of data sensing. The battery voltage measurement is conducted via an analog-to-digital converter, while a DHT11 sensor conducts room temperature and humidity measurements. Besides, a Raspberry Pi is employed for access, process, and visualization of the measured data. On the software side, we use the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) for the messaging protocol. For data visualization, an open-source beautiful interface, called Grafana, is utilized together with the InfluxDB time-series database. Each of those elements is implemented through the Docker container platform to become a standardized-unit called a container. Collecting of the battery voltage and its room temperature and humidity data by the data acquisition system is conducted. The data curve can be observed in three representations, i.e., raw data and mean data in 5 seconds and 1 minute for smoothing the curve.