New to Groov, Modbus over serial?

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1

I did a search and didn’t find an answer for this.

I have Rugid Computer RUG9 network that runs our small water company. It has Modbus ability via serial (RS232 or 485).

Can Groov natively do Modbus over a serial port, or do I need a serial-Elernet adapter for the Rugid, or something else?

Thanks!

2

There is no serial port on the groov Box and groov Server for Windows does not support serial ports.
So, yeah, its ModbusTCP only.
We have done some experiments with ModbusRTU to ModbusTCP converters, and once you get them setup right, they work rather well.

3

Thanks. Do you have a link to one you know works?

Chris

4

Its not the cheapest, but it is good quality;
http://store.fieldserver.com/quickserver-modbus-tcp-modbus-rtu/

The ‘big deal’ with this converter is that it has a buffer, so if the serial is slow, or there are many serial units on the drop, then the unit will not time out on the TCP side due to the buffer.
If you only have one serial device and its faster than 9600 baud, you probably do not need the buffer.

We are using a bit of the fieldserver gear around the place with groov (they have many different protocol converters).

5

Very interesting. Question from the naive here… does the convertor only speak to one RTU device or could it potentially talk to multiple RTU devices?

6

Sorry for the slow reply, been traveling…

Yes, it can connect to multi drop serial devices, in other words, more than one.
(You may have to jigger with the config file and put the serial address in for each device).

The whole point of this unit is that if you have a LOT of say 300 baud serial devices, you may not be able to poll them all at the 1 second rate that groov polls at, so with buffer, groov does not time out and you get the data as quick as you can.