It’s FUNCTION BLOCK FRIDAY! – This week we are looking at MODBUS.
One of the most persistent machine-to-machine communications protocols owing to its simplicity and flexibility that is experiencing a renaissance in applications such as heat pumps and solar PV Inverters and remains common in smart buildings, robotics and industrial automation.
MODBUS is a standard for machines to exchange simple data formats and signal command and control. It is simple and cheap to provide on any MCU-based systems and is widely made available from sensors to controller components that are in close proximity. MODBUS can be IP-based but is commonly used in “RTU” mode with simple twisted pair RS485 wired serial connections.
Lucid supports both MODBUS Master and Slave modes with simple, drag-and-drop function blocks so both master controller and slave software can be developed with Lucid.
Slave devices can offer readable and writable registers that master devices and other slave devices can access. These registers support various data types, including:
-> Boolean values for simple on/off states
-> 16-bit integers for more granular numerical data
-> Combinations of registers to represent more complex data types such as floating-point numbers
