A prototype of an integrated pyranometer for measuring multi-parameters

This paper presents a handheld pyranometer which was integrated with temperature sensor modules. The pyranometer employs a reference solar cell which was calibrated to measure the solar irradiance. Besides the pyranometer, two temperature sensor modules were introduced to measure the ambient temperature and the photovoltaic module temperature. All measurements from the pyranometer and temperature sensors were controlled by a microcontroller PIC16F877A which later provided programming strategy in C language. The programming strategy was designed based on the calibrated solar cell and the temperature sensor modules while the measured values were displayed on an LCD display. The results showed that the prototype integrated pyranometer had relatively similar measured values when compared to a commercial pyranometer and a commercial temperature measuring tool.