General Definitions and Requirements

 

Notes

1. A single piece of generating set control equipment is referred to as a ‘control unit’.

2. A control unit is always a slave device as defined in the Modbus protocol.

3. A PC, building management system or similar system is referred to as a ‘master device’ as defined in the Modbus protocol.

4. A hub is a device which connects a master device to one or more control units, to a master it appears as a slave and to a control unit it appears as a master.

5. A control unit connected to a hub is referred to as a satellite device of the hub.

6. The term ‘slave device’ refers either to a control unit or to a hub when it is viewed from a masters point of view.

7. The transmission mode used shall be RTU not ASCII.

8. The byte format over an RS485 link shall be 1 start bit, 8 data bits, no parity bit and 2 stop bits as defined by the Modbus protocol.

9. The byte format over an RS232 link to a modem or direct to a PC shall be 1 start bit, 8 data bits, no parity bit and 1 stop bit which is the de-facto standard for modems.

10. The baud rate used will be one of those listed in Page 1 - Communications Configuration.

11. Bus time-outs must be detected by the master, as defined in the Modbus protocol.

12. For details of the Unicode character representation refer to the Unicode standard version 2.0 published by the Unicode Consortium.

13. Unicode strings may contain the control code 0x000A which shall be interpreted as “move to the beginning of the next line down”.

14. Any software that reads a Unicode string may either use the control code 0x000A to split the string into separate lines or may replace it with 0x0020 if it is desired to display the string on a single line, it must not be ignored as this may lead to the concatenation of words.

15. In this standard the term ‘ASCII character’ refers to an 8 bit character following the sub-set of Unicode from 0 to 255, it does not refer to any other published standard of character representation to avoid the ambiguities in such standards.

16. The form 0x12AB refers to a hexadecimal number, all other numbers are in decimal.

17. This document describes GenComm version 1, future upgrades of this standard will increase this version number by 1 and must be fully backwards compatible with all previous versions.

18. Any software written to interface with a GenComm version n slave device will be able to interface with a GenComm version n+1, n+2 etc. slave device without modification, and will be able to perform any operation defined in version n, but will not, of course, be able to perform functions added in later versions.

19. Any software written to interface with a GenComm version n slave devices will recognise a GenComm version n-1 slave device (from the ‘Communications Status Information’ page) and perform all operations defined in version n-1 on that slave device, it will not attempt to perform any operations added in later versions of GenComm on that slave device.

 

 

Hubs and Protocol Conversions

A hub may be designed to connect to satellite devices of one of 3 types, ones that recognise the GenComm protocol directly, ones that recognise another Modbus based protocol, or ones that use an entirely unrelated protocol. In the second and third cases the hub must provide protocol conversion which is not defined in this standard.

 

Notes

1. A hub recognises queries from a master device for a range of slave addresses, e.g. a hub with its own slave address set to 20 and 8 satellite sockets will recognise slave addresses 20 to 28. Address 20 corresponds to the hub itself, 21 to its first satellite socket, 22 to its second satellite socket, etc. The hub will respond to all these slave addresses even if there is no satellite connected to a particular satellite socket.

2. A hub will accept queries to its own slave address where appropriate, for example a hub may have some auxiliary digital inputs and outputs.

3. A valid password must be entered into a hub (at its own slave address) before any of its satellite devices or its own registers can be accessed in any way, thus the hub provides security for the entire installation via a single password.

4. A hub designed for GenComm satellites recognises a query from a master that has a slave address corresponding to one of its satellites, checks that the password privilege level is adequate for the specified operation, passes this query on to the satellite, and then returns any response back to the master.

5. A hub designed for other Modbus satellites recognises a query from a master that has a slave address corresponding to one of its satellites, checks that the password privilege level is adequate for the specified operation, converts the protocol as necessary, passes the query on to the satellite, and then returns any response with appropriate conversion. Note that such a hub may not be able to provide security for the satellite as it may not fully understand the satellites protocol, in which case it simply passes the message on regardless of password levels and delegates security to the satellite.

6. A hub designed for non-Modbus satellites must provide complete protocol conversion and must emulate the GenComm registers so that it appears to the master as a GenComm satellite. All security will also appear to work in exactly the same way as for a GenComm satellite.

7. For a description of password privilege levels refer to the Password status register in Page 1 - Communications configuration and status.

8. A hub designed for GenComm satellites will set the slave addresses of all satellites when it initialises, or of a particular satellite when it does not respond. For example a hub with slave address 20 will set its satellites to slave addresses 21, 22 etc. This is achieved without knowing the satellites current slave address by sending broadcast messages (slave address 0) to the satellite to set its slave address. This ensures that the hub will not have to convert the slave addresses in queries from a master or in responses from a satellite. This process can only function if the satellites passwords are completely disabled, which is normally the case for a satellite.

9. A hub designed for Modbus satellites may not be able to set the satellites slave address in this way, the addresses may have to be set manually on each satellite or the hub may have to convert the addresses in each query and response.

10. Although this standard talks about 'satellite sockets' the connection between a hub and satellite may be of any form, a single socket for each satellite, an RS485 bus with the hub as the master, or some other method.

 

Multiple Masters

GenComm is based on Modbus which is a protocol that is only intended for a simple single master network, therefore it does not support multiple masters accessing a slave simultaneously.

 

If a slave device has more than one interface that can act as a master, it must only serve one master at once. Whenever it changes masters it must completely re-initialise the status of the port, in particular it must clear the password status to 0 (Invalid) and the extended exception information to 0 (No error), thus ensuring that there can be no interaction between masters of any kind. Any master that makes a query while its port is not being served must either be answered by exception 6 (Slave device busy) whatever the query was, or not answered at all.

 

The mechanism used by a slave device to decide which master to serve is not defined in this standard, it may be a physical switch, a configuration option or an automatic switch using some mechanism to decide which master to serve. An example of an automatic switch would be a slave device that had an RS485 port to a building management system and an RS232 port to a modem, in this case it might be decided that whenever a modem link is established the RS485 port will be disabled and when the modem link was broken the RS485 port was re-enabled. In such a case it would have to be accepted that the RS485 port would be unavailable whenever the modem link was in use.

 

GenComm does not support multiple communications configurations for multiple master ports.

 

 

Exception Responses

Any function may return an exception response if it does not complete successfully, as define in the Modbus protocol.

 

Notes

1. The Modbus Protocol Reference Guide defines the meanings of exception codes 1 to 8 and the Open Modbus/TCP Specification defines error codes 10 and 11, but unfortunately these meanings are ambiguous, so cannot convey accurate information about the error. This standard, therefore, defines an extended exception code and exception address which can be read from the slave device at registers 0 and 1 respectively.

2. A slave device will only return exception code 1, 2 or 6 if a function fails, in the case of exceptions 1 and 2 the extended exception code and address should then be read to find more information about the exception.

3. The extended exception code will be set to the result of the last message, which implies that a successful read of this register will clear it, this occurs after the read has been performed.

4. The extended exception address will be set to the address of the register that caused the exception, or to 0 if inappropriate. This allows precise identification of the cause when reading or writing multiple registers.

5. The extended exception code and address must both be read by a single message, reading them individually would meaningless as they would each refer to different messages.

6. Extended exception codes 1-255 can be generated by any slave device but codes above 256 can only be generated by a hub.

7. Exception code 6 (Slave device busy) will be returned whenever a slave device is completely unable to reply to a query because it is occupied, in this case the extended exception codes cannot necessarily be read. An example of this is when a slave device is serving a master of a higher priority than the one that made the query.

8. In the case of a hub the extended exception registers contain the result of a query to the hub, they are not changed by a query to a satellite. The corresponding registers in the satellite must be read to obtain the result of such a query.

 

 

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