Raspberry Pi Measuring Power Output From Solar Panel

This guide will show you how to power your raspberry pi using solar panels.

Raspberry pi measuring power output from solar panel.

Also you must wire grounds of the battery solar panel load and the raspberry pi together to be able to measure individual voltages. To get the voltage of the thing you re measuring you must add the bus voltage and shunt voltage to get all the components of the measurement. Here s a breakdown of. And with the right solar panel and battery your project can also run continuously forever.

If you plot voltage vs current you ll see that as the load current is increased the output voltage on the panel drops. Building a solar powered pi is a surprisingly easy task. Here is my setup. Accuracy is better than 1 on current and voltage and it works with most of the panels on the market below 500 watts peak power.

Something i forgot to realize for a long time. Connecting the solar panel to the pi zero. Most solar panels in the market today are 9v. This equivalent reistance is also not a fixed value but varies with load current.

The entire software stack runs from either windows or a linux raspberry pi. I m setting up an off grid solar solution and the mppt controller i purchased only supports modbus via serial. Off of the battery i have a 12 volt to 5 volt battery eliminator that drops the voltage safely to 5 volts that i spliced into a micro usb cord. They re cheap and you can buy them anywhere.

Powering your pi using solar power will allow you to build green pi projects powered by the sun. However the pi zero needs only 1 1 5a so make sure to adjust accordingly. The last piece of the pie ha was a basic serial to usb cable. You can also easily integrate thermocouples and the pi can sit a few hundred feet away form the panels under test.

The solar panel shown in the connection diagram was idealised and in the real world should include an equivalent series resistance. 30 watt solar panel with a 12 volt charger hooked up to a 33 amp hour 12 volt battery.