What is RS485 network?

What is an RS-485 network? RS-485 allows multiple devices (up to 32) to communicate at half-duplex on a single pair of wires, plus a ground wire (more on that later), at distances up to 1200 meters (4000 feet).

Is RS232 used today?

The current version of the standard is TIA-232-F Interface Between Data Terminal Equipment and Data Circuit-Terminating Equipment Employing Serial Binary Data Interchange, issued in 1997. The RS-232 standard had been commonly used in computer serial ports and is still widely used in industrial communication devices.

What is RS485 Modbus?

RS485 is a serial data transmission standard widely used in industrial implementations. The Modbus protocol is commonly used when implementing RS485 communication. This differentiates RS485 from the RS232 protocol which communicates by transmitting with ASCII characters.

How is the RS-485 bus used for serial communication?

At the data layer RS-485 generally uses a UART for serial communication where the host UART drives and receives the serial communication in full duplex. It is connected to the RS-485 differential transceiver that makes up the physical layer and converts the signals into the half-duplex differential format for use on the RS-485 bus.

Is there a software to monitor RS-485 ports?

Thankfully, there’s a dedicated RS-485 test software that is designed to make it as simple as possible to monitor and analyze RS-485 port activity. Packed with a slew of advanced features, the software doesn’t need additional hardware to track and record data going through monitored serial ports.

How is RS485 handled in the Linux kernel?

The Linux kernel provides the serial_rs485 structure (see) to handle RS485 communications. This data structure is used to set and configure RS485 parameters in the platform data and in ioctls. The device tree can also provide RS485 boot time parameters (see for bindings).