Modbus is a serial communication protocol. It was developed by Modicon in 1979. It’s an open protocol, and so you can buy devices from many different vendors, and they will all speak Modbus.
Modbus works in a master slave relationship where you have one master communicating up to 247 slaves. It’s also poll and response so you will have a master that will poll all of the slaves, and the slaves will respond by sending all of the data out. Modbus is a legacy protocol. It has been used on thousands, millions of systems around the world and industrial settings.
Oil and gas is one of the heavy users of Modbus, and a lot of the Dycor products work with Modbus including our SmartVue, the dataTaker, and our FreeWave radio. There are a number of industrial communications protocols including Fieldbus, Profibus, but Modbus is really one of the most common ones used, and we expect that it’s going to be utilized for many more years to come.
So while Modbus was started in 1979 as a serial only protocol, it has now evolved and includes an ethernet version which is called Modbus TCP.
Transcript from video at: https://youtu.be/xCbd8d2yaXA