Modbus
A simple, decades-old serial and TCP protocol that remains the most widely spoken data language of industrial equipment.
Modbus is an industrial communication protocol dating to 1979 that survives because of its simplicity: a master device polls registers on slave devices — PLCs, meters, drives, controllers — and reads or writes values. It runs over serial lines (Modbus RTU, typically RS-485) or Ethernet (Modbus TCP), and virtually every industrial device made in the last forty years speaks some dialect of it.
Its limitations are the flip side of its simplicity: no built-in security, no data typing or semantics (register 40012 is just a number until documentation says it is a temperature in tenths of a degree), and polling-based communication that does not scale elegantly. Modern deployments wrap Modbus behind gateways that add security, context, and translation to richer protocols such as MQTT or OPC-UA.
For maintenance platforms, Modbus support is the key to existing equipment: energy meters, chiller controllers, generator panels, and legacy PLCs can be read without modification, turning installed hardware into a telemetry source at near-zero marginal cost.
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