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Serial Slave HOW-TO

About

This document is a tutorial for writing Modbus/Serial Slave applications utilizing the jamod library. It explains the basics and walk's you through a simple command line Slave implementation,that will serve the values from a static process image on Master requests.
If you are new to Modbus, it is highly recommended to first take a look at Understanding the Protocol (especially the section about the Serial implementation) as well as the actual protocol specifications.

Warning

You will need the Java Communications API extension (javax.comm) installed to be able to run serial modbus applications.
Note that there is also support for building with the gnu.io prefix (RXTX), via the boolean build property build.serial.gnu (true will cause the build process to replace the javax.comm prefix with gnu.io in the sources used for builds.

Note

The application build in the tutorial is actually part of the distribution codebase (net.wimpi.modbus.cmd.SerialSlaveTest).

What is a Slave?

Thinking in terms of the Client-Server network computing paradigm, the Slave application is a Server. It has a Listener for receiving an incoming Request from the Master application (which indeed is a Client) and sends a corresponding Response, just as described in Understanding the Protocol.

In case of the serial implementation, the communication can be point-to-point (RS232, 422, 485) or on a shared signal cable (RS 485). In both cases there can be only one master, that acquires data from a source (data acquisition), or writes data to a sink (device control) and one or multiple slaves.
A possible simple network setup for this tutorial is composed of two nodes, as depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Network Setup

Network setup

The implementation from the jamod library will automagically construct the actual responses for requests related to the standard Modbus data model, according to the contents of the actually set Process Image.
The reference to the actual Process Image is stored in the Modbus Coupler a singleton instance accessible throughout the VM.

What is a Process Image?

A process image is basically a collection of Discrete Inputs, Discrete Outputs (Coils), Input Registers and Registers.
Please refer to Understanding the Process Image for more information.

Classes of Interest for the Developer

The motivation for creating jamod was to achieve an intuitive and object oriented implementation of the Modbus protocol, in a way, that there is a natural mapping from the domain knowledge (i.e. Modbus protocol) to the abstract class model.
The important elements in the description above (What is a Slave?) have been highlighted and the following list represents the mapping between them and the classes from jamod that will be needed for a slave implementation:

Implementation

As the idea is to provide a tutorial in form of a very simple command line example, it will consist of only one class and most of the work will be done in the entry method (public static void main(String args[])). This is probably not the way jamod will be usually employed in OO designs, but we hope it serves the demonstrative purpose.

Now let's start writing code. We need a simple Java application skeleton, with imports of all jamod packages:

import net.wimpi.modbus.net.*;
import net.wimpi.modbus.procimg.*;
import net.wimpi.modbus.ModbusCoupler;
import net.wimpi.modbus.util.SerialParameters;

public class SerialSlaveTest {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    try {
      ...
      ...
    } catch (Exception ex) {
      ex.printStackTrace();
    }
  }//main

}//class SerialSlaveTest	  
	  

Next we add the instances and variables the application will need:

/* The important instances and variables */
ModbusSerialListener listener = null;
SimpleProcessImage spi = null;
portname = args[0]; //the portname of the serial port to listen to	  
	  

Next we will construct the process image and setup the coupler to hold the reference:

//1. Prepare a process image
spi = new SimpleProcessImage();
spi.addDigitalOut(new SimpleDigitalOut(true));
spi.addDigitalOut(new SimpleDigitalOut(false));
spi.addDigitalIn(new SimpleDigitalIn(false));
spi.addDigitalIn(new SimpleDigitalIn(true));
spi.addDigitalIn(new SimpleDigitalIn(false));
spi.addDigitalIn(new SimpleDigitalIn(true));
spi.addRegister(new SimpleRegister(251));
spi.addInputRegister(new SimpleInputRegister(45));

//2. Create the coupler and set the slave identity
ModbusCoupler.getReference().setProcessImage(spi);
ModbusCoupler.getReference().setMaster(false);
ModbusCoupler.getReference().setUnitID(2);  
	  

Note

It should be relatively easy to create your own classes of process image related instances. These might even use the Java Native Interface (JNI) to directly access specific hardware, and expose their state as register, input register, input discrete or coil.

We will also need to setup the parameters for the serial communication:

//3. Set up serial parameters
SerialParameters params = new SerialParameters();
params.setPortName(portname);
params.setBaudRate(9600);
params.setDatabits(8);
params.setParity("None");
params.setStopbits(1);
params.setEncoding("ascii");
params.setEcho(false);
	  

Note

You should adapt the serial parameters to your requirements, which you can do hardcoded or by reading in the parameters from the commandline or as properties file.
The parameter setting for the serial encoding will be used by the SerialConnection instance to instantiate the proper SerialTransport instance. In the example we are using the default flavor (ascii). If you want use the bin flavor, all you need to do is to set the encoding property of the SerialParameter instance.

Warning

The RTU encoding is not supported in slave mode.

Last step is to create and start the listener:

//4. Set up serial listener
listener = new ModbusSerialListener(params);
listener.setListening(true);	  
	  

This will do the job. You can test the slave using the master application from the Serial Master HOW-TO, be sure to use equal communication parameters on both sides.

Note

The debug outputs of the library can be activated by passing the property net.wimpi.modbus.debug to the JVM (i.e. java -Dnet.wimpi.modbus.debug=true) and allow to see the actually exchanged modbus messages encoded as hex.

by Dieter Wimberger