Development of a Low-cost LoRa based SCADA system for Monitoring and Supervisory Control of Small Renewable Energy Generation Systems

Abstract

This paper presents the design and development of a low-cost, open-source LoRa based Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system for monitoring and control of small-sized microgrids located in remote locations. The proposed system is based on the 4th SCADA generation (IoT based), which features the combination of connectivity of components for data sharing. The proposed system employs LoRa physical level communication as the communication channel, and comprises of voltage and current sensors that act as the field instrumentation devices to acquire electrical parameters from the system. It also features LEDs that represent actuators for control. An Arduino Uno microcontroller is employed as the Remote Terminal Unit (RTU) to receive the parameters and process them for ttransmission. The Chirpstack IOT server, Node-Red, Influxdb, and Grafana are all installed locally on the Raspberry Pi (Master Terminal Unit, MTU) for data processing, storage, monitoring, and remote control of the actuators. The proposed system was set up in the Electrical Engineering Laboratory of the Memorial University to monitor a 130 W, 12 V solar PV panel with batteries Connected for energy storage. The acquired data is published on dashboards created on Grafana for monitoring and control.