Meadow and RS485 (and Modbus RTU oh my!)

If you’re building an industrial embedded application, you’re probably aware of the RS485 standard. It’s been an industry standard for decades and it persists because it’s both simple and works very well over long distances and in EM-noisy environments.

The Wilderness Labs Project Lab board, starting with revision 3.e, fully supports RS485. This provides an easy and fast way for you to prototype Meadow solutions that communicate with RS485 devices, which include a large array of industrial control devices that use the Modbus RTU protocol.

We implemented RS485 on the Project Lab using an SC16IS752 UART expander along with an SP3485 transceiver. Like all of our drivers, the UART expander driver is open source and since the Project Lab hardware is also open source, you can use it as a reference design for your final product. Open sourcing is just one of the many ways Wilderness Labs and the Meadow ecosystem help you deliver reliable IoT solutions faster.

Join our Slack community to let us know if you find these helpful, and/or if there are others that would help you ship faster.