Development of real-time solar monitoring system

Solar energy is the light and radiant heat from the Sun that influences Earth's climate and weather and sustains life. Solar power is synonym with solar energy or more specifically to refer to electricity generated from solar radiation. Solar energy technologies can provide electrical generation by heat engine to use for space heating and cooling in active and passive solar buildings; potable water via distillation and disinfection, day lighting, hot water, thermal energy for cooking, and high temperature process for industrial purposes. Even all of us know about this useful energy, but awareness of researcher about this energy still low level in Malaysia. There are many useful application can designed to sure this energy able to use with more efficient. Due to that awareness, a system that can show the solar panel parameter, like the voltage, current, power produced will be develop. This system used Visual Basic Studio 6.0 software and a hardware circuit to convert the signal from solar panel to a digital signal. This project used Microcontroller Programmable Intelligent Circuit (PIC) 18F4550 as their controller circuit. This PIC18F4550 will control the all the analog input from current sensor and voltage divider then convert it into digital signal before pass through the Universal Serial Bus (BUS), then receive by Visual Basic Studio 6.0. Voltage, current and power value will be displayed at GUI at Visual Basic Studio. This system also has built in database system to record all the data entered