Eru connections

There are several of interesting techniques that can be used to connect to smart devices in the industry. You can make a research and compare the use of these techniques to have performance improvements in your monitoring process.

If you want to just use Eru, you can use Modbus to connect to smart devices. Simple and robust, it has since become a de facto standard communication protocol and is now a commonly available means of connecting industrial electronic devices. The main reasons for the use of Modbus in the industrial environment are:

• Developed with industrial applications in mind.
• Openly published and royalty-free.
• Easy to deploy and maintain.
• Moves raw bits or words without placing many restrictions on vendors.

The Device-Simulator software can simulate those devices, so you can develop your SCADA in your laptop while drinking cofee. These give you some advantages:

• Easy to use.
• Linux compatible.
• Free.
• Made by Assemblits organization using Qt examples and features.

Modbus enables communication among many devices connected to the same network, for example, a system that measures temperature and humidity and communicates the results to a computer.

Create connections

As depicted in the Wiki home page, you can easily create connections in Eru. Once the application is started, a project is loaded containing 5 components:

• Connections
• Devices
• Tags
• Users
• Displays

If you select connections in the project tree, eru will show you a table to add and remove connections. To create a new connection or add it to the table, just right click the table and select Add in the context menu. When you select Add a prompt windows is displayed asking for a name and type of connection. Select a nice name and choose the protocol version of the Modbus connection.

Versions of the Modbus protocol exist for serial port and for Ethernet and other protocols that support the Internet protocol suite.

All eru tables are showing the most used parameters by default, you can see more attributes of the connection clicking the plus sign at the corner of the table.

The first table column has an Action button. Once your connection are properly configured you can test your connection by clicking it.

Connections parameters

• Group: Used to organize your devices in Eru by using the search bar.
• Name: Used to customize your device name.
• Type: Modbus TCP / Serial. Select is you wish to connect to devices that implement the Modbus TCP protocol or serial.
• Enable: Used to ignore connect actions from the user or eru.
• Timeout: Is the amount of time in milliseconds to wait for a response before treating it as a failure, after sending a request to the Modbus device.
• Sampling: Select if you want to delay the sampling time for performance issues.