This paper presents a low-cost solution of virtual instrumentation to provide a new technique for real-time instrumentation of the PV panel characteristics such as voltage, current and power. The system design is based on a low-cost Arduino acquisition board. The acquisition is made through a low-cost current and voltage sensors, and data are presented in Excel by using the PLX-DAQ data acquisition Excel Macro, which allows communication between the ATMega328 microcontroller of an Arduino UNO board and the computer by UART bus. Hence, the I–V and P–V characteristics, which processed under real-time conditions, can be obtained directly and plotted on an Excel spreadsheet without needing to reprogram the microcontroller. A comparison between this low-cost virtual instrumentation and the traditional instrumentation is drawn in this work. It is found that our solution presents several benefits compared to the traditional solution such as the data can be presented in graphical form in real time. Thus, several experimental tests to confirm the effectiveness of the developed virtual instrumentation system are presented in this study.

中文翻译：

---

与传统仪器相比，使用Excel和Arduino的低成本光伏面板特性虚拟仪器

本文提出了一种虚拟仪器的低成本解决方案，为光伏面板特性（例如电压，电流和功率）的实时仪器提供了一种新技术。系统设计基于低成本的Arduino采集板。通过低成本的电流和电压传感器进行采集，并通过使用PLX-DAQ数据采集Excel Macro在Excel中显示数据，该软件允许Arduino UNO板的ATMega328微控制器与计算机之间通过UART总线进行通信。因此，可以直接获得在实时条件下处理过的I–V和P–V特性，并将其绘制在Excel电子表格中，而无需重新编程微控制器。这项工作将这种低成本的虚拟仪器与传统仪器进行了比较。我们发现，与传统解决方案相比，我们的解决方案具有多种优势，例如可以以图形形式实时显示数据。因此，在这项研究中提出了一些实验测试来确认已开发的虚拟仪器系统的有效性。