mothbus, a c++11 library for the modbus protocol

Introduction

The goal of the mothbus library is to provide a complete and simple implementation of the modbus protocol as defined on modbus.org. It provides role agnostic intefaces for modbus-tcp and modbus-rtu, which means you can use the same code for server (called slaves in modbus context) and clients (called master), as well a simple client interface. The design goals (which set it apart of other modbus implementations) are:

• Scalability. Mothbus scales from tiny microcontrollers to the cloud.

• Network layer agnostic. Mothbus does not implement the network layer, which allows it to be ported to almost everything. As it is heavily influenced by boost::asio it works best with it.

• Async api. A simple, based on boost::asio, asynchronous api (if your network layer support it).

• Low memory footprint Dynamic memory allocations are kept to a minimum.

Status

The library is currently in a proof-of-concept state and while it maybe already works, there are many unaddressed issues and internal inconsistencies.

Requirements

• C++11, propably some C++14 features required
• gsl (tested with https://github.com/viboes/GSL)
• boost (asio, system (program_options for examples))
• google-test for unit tests

To Build

Mothbus is a header only library, so simple add the include path to your project. For tests and examples you can use cmake.

Example

Reading a register from a modbus tcp device:

#include <iostream>
#include <boost/asio.hpp>
#include <mothbus/adu/tcp.h>

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{	
	// network code
	using boost::asio::ip::tcp;
	std::string host = "localhost";	
	boost::asio::io_service io_service;
	tcp::resolver resolver(io_service);
	tcp::socket socket(io_service);
	boost::asio::connect(socket, resolver.resolve(tcp::resolver::query{host, "502"}));

	// mothbus reads from server
	mothbus::tcp_master<tcp::socket> client(socket);
	std::array<mothbus::byte, 2> singleRegister;
	client.read_registers(slave, register_address, singleRegister);
	
	// output value
	uint16_t value = (gsl::to_integer<uin16_t>(singleRegister[0]) << 8) + gsl::to_integer<uin16_t>(singleRegister[0]);
	std::cout << value;	
	return 0;
}