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Newsletter Issue # 32

Real Time Automation's - Best Darn Newsletter 


IN THIS ISSUE
The Human Connection
Data Representation: the Secret to Understanding Modbus
Fun Facts and Trivia


STEAL OF THE MONTH...
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BLOGS
September 6, 2016
Hollywood Hype and EDS
August 25, 2016
The Odd Couple: OPC UA and Modbus
August 24, 2016
What’s ‘Open’ on the Factory Floor is Not What’s ‘Open’ to IT
August 10, 2016
Architecting an EtherNet/IP Device
August 2, 2016
Modbus Plus: Mystery at the Museum
July 29, 2016
Architecting OPC UA Systems



 

YOUNG GUN AUTOMATION INSERT

Practical tips and information for young engineers. This issue, featuring:

- OMG - 30 Year Olds Are Taking Over Automation!

- Drives - Man These Things Are Cool!

 

 





The Human Connection


A Column of personal opinion by John Rinaldi, Founder and Owner of Real Time Automation.

“Emotional labor” is what makes Joey - and all of us, should we choose to show up that way - indispensable in the workforce.

Nothing special about the place. They serve the same breakfast and the same burgers served in thousands of other places. It’s your typical little diner in your typical strip mall, and not a well-traveled one at that. In fact it’s hard to notice the place. It’s not in an affluent neighborhood. You actually have to go out of your way to get there.

But people do – for Joey. Let me tell you about Joey. Joey is the morning server – “waiter” would be much too pretentious – at this typical little small town diner. With that kind of menu, in that kind of place, in that kind of neighborhood you’d expect to find gloom, dejection, boredom, and despair. A bored server going through the motions, counting the seconds until quittin’ time.

But instead, what you get is Joey – happy, talkative, good natured, smiling, and engaged. Joey flies around that place pouring coffee, getting extra syrup, making sure the cooks get the eggs right for Tom, the bacon crisp for Sally, and the sandwich up fast because Jack needs to leave. But more than that, Joey’s delivering a human connection – you walk out feeling better about yourself and humanity then when you arrived (even if you had the French toast, which I wouldn’t suggest).

Joey’s not just serving bacon and eggs; Joey really is an “artist” as defined in Seth Godin’s book Linchpin. Eggs they can get anywhere; they come for Joey – to experience his art. Joey passionately and artfully delivers an experience: a uniqueness; a connection in a job that most would find demeaning drudgery.

Joey’s “art” is what makes him indispensable. I’d venture to say that the owner would rather close the restaurant then lose Joey. Joey delivers what Godin calls “emotional labor” – the work you do that creates feelings. It’s what we all want today: uniqueness, authenticity, and connection.

It’s time we all became Joeys. In fact, I’ll go further: We HAVE to become Joeys!

For 300 years now we’ve all been asked (blue collar and white collar) to show up at work, follow the instructions of the boss, check your creativity at the door, take a paycheck, a 401K, and some vacation time. School trained us for that kind of job. That training made us commodities – replaceable. The more PERL (Percentage of Easily Replaceable Workers), the less each worker cost, and the more profit for the business owners.

For a long time now we’ve seen factory jobs disappearing. Automated systems are wiring, fastening, turning, lifting, pushing, pulling -- all the manual labor jobs that people used to do. If you’re a white collar worker, it might happen to you, so get ready. If you’re a lawyer, a lot of the legal briefs are being written by software. If you’re a nurse, robots are delivering prescriptions and soon will be administering them. If you’re an engineer, automated systems will soon be writing software and if not designing bridges, buildings and circuits; they’ll do a lot of the work. The harsh truth is there is less need for the commodity of human labor.

Yes, it’s YOUR job that’s at risk now. But only if you’re not an artist. Only if you’re not the person in your organization that provides the insight, the creative solutions, the uniqueness, and the humanity. Only if you’re not a “Joey.” Now we need to be brilliant. We need to be connected. We need to think creatively, have passion, inspiration and boldness. We need to be emotional laborers. We need to be more human.

Can you do it? Can you be indispensable like Joey?

 

 

 

- John

 

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Trivia

·  True or false: Halloween is the second largest commercial holiday in America?

·  In what country did Jack o ’Lanterns originate?

·  Pumpkins can come in what seven colors?

·  According to superstition, seeing what creature on Halloween signifies the spirit of a deceased loved one watching over you?

· On average, how many pounds of candy corn are produced each year?

 

Answers located on bottom of page.

 

Data Representation: the Secret to Understanding Modbus

In the movie City Slickers, the old cowboy, Curly (Jack Palance) tells Mitch (Billy Crystal) the secret of life. “One thing. Just one thing,” he says—but that you need to figure it out for yourself. And it’s what makes life meaningful again for Mitch when he realizes that his wife and children are all that really matter to him.

Well, Modbus isn’t the answer to the secret of life. But I can tell you the one pseudo-secret that’s the key to understanding Modbus - data representation. (Actually, it’s the key to understanding DeviceNet, Profibus, EtherNet/IP, Profinet IO and every other protocol). If you understand the data representation for a protocol, you’re 80% of the way to understanding what that communications protocol does and how it does it.

Like everything else about Modbus, the data representation is pretty simple. In fact, data is represented more simply in Modbus than in any other industrial protocol you’ll ever find. There are only two data types in Modbus: coils and registers.

Coils - Coils are simply single bits. The bits can be ON (1) or they can be OFF (0). Some coils represent inputs, meaning they contain the status of some physical discrete input. Or they represent outputs, meaning that they hold the state of some physical discrete output signal.

Registers - Registers are simply 16-bit unsigned register data. Registers can have a value from 0 to 65535 (0 to FFFF hexadecimal). There is no representation for negative values, no representation for values greater than 65535, and no representation for real data like 200.125.

Applications can impose these representations on registers. For example, a register can treat two registers, the first containing 200 and the second containing 125, as 200.125. Or an application can group four registers and place a 64-bit IEEE floating point bit pattern in those registers. Any application can organize and treat register data in any way it may want, but there is no way for any other Modbus device to automatically know what that representation is. A Modbus application that reads registers from a Modbus slave device must have some prior knowledge of how particular registers are treated to process them correctly.

Registers are grouped into input registers and holding registers. Like input coils, input registers report the state of some external input as a value between 0 and 65535. The original intent of an input register was to reflect the value of some analog input. It is a digital representation of an analog signal like a voltage or a current. Most Modbus devices today are not I/O devices, and input registers simply function identically to holding registers. Holding registers were originally designed as temporary program storage for devices like Modbus controllers. Today, holding registers function as data storage for devices.

Both Modbus registers and coils are addressed with the first register or coil as Address 1 and the last as Address 65536. That means that there can be up to 65536 (10000 Hex) input registers, 65536 output registers, 65536 input coils and 65536 status coils, but most devices use far fewer. Often you will find no coils in a device, and sometimes as few as 10 holding registers.

A lot of novice Modbus users find the address space notation used in Modbus confusing. Modbus includes the address space type with the index in the address space. The typical address space notation used in Modbus follows:

0x is Status Coil Address Space from 00000 to 065535
1x is Input Coil Address Space from 10000 to 165535
3x is Input Register Address Space from 30000 to 365535
4x is Holding Register Address Space from 40000 to 465535

So, when you see a notation that some value is at Modbus register 40010, you know that the value is stored in a holding register at offset 10, the 11th value, in the holding register area of the device. The reason that this is important is that there are specific Modbus functions that operate on specific areas of the address space. There is a read holding register command that always reads registers in the 4x address space. There is a write single coil register that only writes coils in the 0x address space.

What’s important to note about this data addressing is that the coil addressing is specifying bit addresses, while register addresses specify 16-bit unsigned integer values. Input coil address 2 is a bit address. It’s the third bit of the coil address space. Input holding register address 2 is the address of a 16-bit value. It’s the third value of the holding register address space.

The commands that operate on these address spaces reflect those data types. A command to read coils specifying a length of 3 is going to return 8 bits, of which only 3 will be valid. Coil address 3 for a length of 3 returns coils 3, 4 and 5. A command to read registers specifying a length of 3 returns three 16-bit values. It returns the values of registers 3, 4 and 5.

Write commands work in the opposite direction. When writing three coils, you must specify the three bits you want to write as the first three bits of the input data in the command. But when writing three registers, you must supply three 16-bit values.

Other than some awkward notation that is a left over from the era when Modicon Inc. designed the protocol, the Modbus data representation is very simple and straightforward. When a Modbus device is designed, the designer makes a decision of not only how many registers or coils are needed, but also which address space to use (input coil, status coil, input register, holding register) and where in that address space to locate those values. A designer may have only 10 bits of coil data and 2 registers. Those bits and registers can be located anywhere in the Modbus address space.

That example points to one of the deficiencies of this data representation. There are no standards. There is no way to communicate to the user of the device any meta-data. If the value of register 40100 is a temperature, there is no standard way to communicate the meaning of register 40100 and how to interpret the data. The user has no information to know if a value of 1001 means 100.1 degrees or 10.01 degrees or 1001 degrees.

There is also no standard regarding device profiles. Another temperature controller may store its temperature at 40200 and use a completely different data interpretation.

>The Modbus data representation is simple and almost standards-free. That is both a blessing and a curse to those of us who still use Modbus on a daily basis.

 

 

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Fun Facts

·The snowboard was invented by industrial engineer, Serman Poppen, who invented a toy for his daughter by tying two skis together and attaching a rope to one end.

·The word engineer comes from a Latin word meaning "cleverness."

·The building of the Panama Canal was one of the most difficult engineering projects ever. It’s estimated that over 25,000 workers lost their lives during the long and dangerous project, with most dying from disease and landslides.

·An engineer can have a doctor title in front of his name, while a doctor cannot have an engineering title in their name.

 

 

 

  Trivia Answers: True; Ireland; Orange, green, yellow, white, red, blue, and tan; Spider; 35 million pounds
   

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