Build an IoT-Based Solar Panel Monitor

Using the Sigfox LPWAN In this project article, Pedro details how to make an end-to-end IoT device for monitoring electrical energy generated by solar panels, to monitor exactly how much electrical energy is being generated to recharge a battery. For wireless communication to send data to the cloud, the system uses Sigfox LPWAN communication. The demand for renewable energy to supply a great variety of electronic devices has increased in recent years. This is justified both by the need to generate electrical energy in a sustainable way, and the need to have an environmentally friendly complement to current power sources for electronic devices. Among all methods of producing electrical energy in a renewable way, solar energy—generated through solar panels and auxiliary circuitry—is one of the best ways to reach this goal. Consider that, in most of the places on planet Earth, every day there is some useful sunlight to be converted to electrical energy. Taking advantage of this huge (and free) amount of renewable energy to produce electrical energy is, therefore, the key to supplying power to recharge batteries in electronic and embedded devices, mainly in remote places where other power sources are not available. But how to know for sure how much electrical energy can be produced in a certain place, to be used to recharge batteries? How can it be remotely monitored using the Internet? These are the questions this article will answer, proposing an end-to-end IoT solution to monitor the useful electrical energy generated by solar panels, using an embedded device, Sigfox LPWAN and TagoIO IoT platform. All software involved in this project is open source, and is hosted on my project GitHub repository at [1]. REDFOX DEVELOPMENT KIT This project uses the RedFox development kit for housing the Sigfox transceiver (HT32SX) and main programmable module (Arduino Nano V3). This kit was developed by Brazilian engineer Luiz Henrique Corrêa Bernardes [2]. The Re