Apple Macintosh Modbus Communications Driver

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Thread Starter

Gerard Kennedy

I am wondering if anyone on this this list has come across a Modbus Communications Driver for an Apple Mac (G4). The application involves building a "home made MMI and recipe management interface" to allow a Mac to collect data from and download setpoints to an RTU. I do know that there used to be a Mac Comms Driver for A-B DF1 some years ago but I cant remember where it came from

Thanks & Regards

Gerard Kennedy
[email protected]
 
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Rich Anderson

I don't know if they have just a Mac Modbus Communications Driver, But National Instruments is about the only "Mac Friendly" Automations
Solution Company I have been able to find. http://www.ni.com

I know that their product "BridgeView" will run on a Mac, and it will also talk to Modbus.

Because you want to make a "home made MMI and recipe management interface", this might be more software than you want.

Let us know what kind of solution you were able to find.

Rich Anderson
Automation Controls Programmer
Anamax Group
 
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Vic Ellescas

Finally somebody have the guts to use Mac on control system. It's the most reliable system and easiest to use.
Vic
Controls Engineer.
 
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Al Pawlowski, PE

From 1987 through 1996 I personally put in, or worked on, 8 SCADA water/wastewater systems based on Mac centrals and operator terminals. The first one ran on a 128KB Mac plus, had about 15 RTU's and the senior plant operator liked it so much that he wrote up a little article in water system journal.

I have also put in, or worked on, Windows and minicomputer based systems. I found the Mac hardware/software to be somewhat more reliable than the Wintel ones; probably because of the tighter control Apple's kept on the Mac archetecture. I also found the SCADA package I used (Harmony from Green Leaf Systems) to require far less resources, in both configuration and operator support, than a typical Windows or
minicomputer based system.

However, Mac is a tough sell. Most of my systems only got in because of a good personal relationship with the client and when one would take the trouble to actually try the product.

If I am not mistaken, Planters Peanuts and DuPont have also been big on Mac's; at least at one time or another.
 
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I lost the original poster's question. But, I agree with Vic - its great to see someone admitting to using a Mac in a control system. A system integrator, working on a project at Apple's manufacturing facility here in Sacramento, CA, recently asked me how to get Macs talking to A-B PLC's. I had to tell him I didn't know of any communications drivers. If anyone has
answers I too would appreciate hearing about them here.

BTW: This summer Apple will release MacOS X ("X" = 10). Practically the only thing it will have in common with the current OS is the name. Like Linux, it's based on BSD Unix. They call the core OS Darwin and have released it as open source. It looks amazingly cool.

Mike Ryan
Aerojet Fine Chemicals
 
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Anthony Kerstens

Guts? An informed and deliberate decision is required.

Are you trying to provoke a response?

Anthony Kerstens P.Eng.
 
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Al Pawlowski, PE

Mike,

Tell your friend to try and get a hold of Green Leaf Systems in Berkeley. Their Harmony SCADA software had a number of available comm protocols. I am surprised Apple didn't know about them. I know they were once a registered Apple VAR and listed in the Apple software suppliers
book.
 
J
For the record, I have used Acuity vision systems that are based on a Mac platform. Worked amazingly well...
 
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Alex Pavloff

> I lost the original poster's question. But, I agree with Vic
> - its great to see someone admitting to using a Mac in a control system.

But... but... Its not that people think fruity colors aren't appropriate for control systems, its that Macs just aren't designed for it at all.
Heck, PCs are just now beginning to drop RS-232 ports... the Mac did that a while back, right?

Round peg, square hole, and quite honestly, I've got better things to do than get a really big hammer. If the tool works, use it. Advocacy has no place in environments where screwups can hurt people.

> Like Linux, it's based on BSD Unix.

Linux is not based on BSD Unix.
 
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WHOA! Excuse me, but you are going to have to fight the entire National Instruments engineering department, if you want to say dumb things like
that, unless you are being funny! Labview was and is a Mac-native application, and it was literally years before it became available in a
Windoze version.

And Linux _is_ a unix derivative, just like all the other -ixs. It is just "_Lin_ us' _U_ n _ix_."

Walt Boyes
(who does not, and has never, worked for National Instruments, but admires them very much...and knows the history)
 
>> I lost the original poster's question. But, I agree with Vic
>> - its great to see someone admitting to using a Mac in a control system.

> But... but... Its not that people think fruity colors aren't appropriate
> for control systems, its that Macs just aren't designed for it at all....<clip>... Advocacy has no
> place in environments where screwups can hurt people.

No argument here, I'm not advocating, it's just nice to see someone using Macintosh. But, I don't understand your reference to RS-232 ports.

>> Like Linux, it's based on BSD Unix.
>
> Linux is not based on BSD Unix.

Oops! Your comment is much more correct than mine. I'm just learning the history of Unix. NO HOLY WAR INTENDED! However, I did a little research and here's what I found:

From the Boston Globe article: "Even better than Linux" By Simson L. Garfinkel, 09/16/99
"...Where the BSD projects are largely the work of individuals, businesses are now the driving force in the Linux community. This may be one reason proponents of Linux are frequently slow to admit the debt they owe to the Computer Science Research Group at Berkeley, which created BSD, and to the Free Software Foundation at MIT, the charitable organization that raised money for Project GNU. Although Linus Torvalds frequently gets the credit for creating Linux, he only wrote the system's kernel. The rest he cobbled
together from other sources, largely BSD and GNU."


From the book: Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, by Marshall Kirk McKusick
"Today, the open source software movement is gaining increased attention and respect. Although the Linux system is perhaps the most well-known, about half of the utilities that it comes packaged with are drawn from the BSD
distribution. The Linux distributions are also heavily dependent on the complier, debuggers, and other development tools written by the Free
Software Foundation. Collectively, the CSRG, the Free Software Foundation, and the Linux kernel developers have created the platform from which the Open Source software movement has been launched."

Without BSD, UNIX as we know it would not exist. BSD allowed Sun, DEC, Sequent, and many others to make UNIX what it is today. While a lot of Linux
proponents would like to think that Linus and other developers created Linux, the truth is that they are a branch that has benefited from all the
previous work done on UNIX, Minix, and BSD.

From Apple's website, http://www.apple.com/macosx/inside.html:
"The system's kernel, which does the heavy lifting to support all those rich applications, is based on Mach 3.0 from Carnegie-Mellon University and FreeBSD 3.2 (derived from the University of California at Berkeley's BSD
4.4-Lite), the most highly regarded core technologies from two of the most widely acclaimed OS projects of the modern era."

Regards,

Mike Ryan
Aerojet Fine Chemicals
 
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Vic Ellescas

Let me try it again:
Finally somebody with informed and deliberate decision used Mac on control system.
Vic
 
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Alex Pavloff

> WHOA! Excuse me, but you are going to have to fight the
> entire National Instruments engineering department, if you want to say dumb
> things like that, unless you are being funny! Labview was and is a Mac-native
> application, and it was literally years before it became
> available in a Windoze version.

I won't argue that it *was* good, but honestly, Apple is one company, and I don't see Industrial Automation as *currently* being part of Steve Job's master plan. If someone is currently using a new Mac in automation, gimme a plate, and I'll eat my words right up. :)

The original poster said :

"> Like Linux, it's based on BSD Unix. "

and I said: Linux is not based on BSD Unix.

I never said Linux wasn't Unix. Linux was created with Linus Torvalds wrote from scratch something that looked a bit like Minix, and it evolved from there. BSD Unix has been around a lot longer than Linux has.
 
L
I did a search about Green Leaf and Harmony on internet, but I cannot find their URL. Does anyone know it? Thanks again

Luigi Faccio
 
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I happen to be in California right now and stopped in to see Green Leaf a couple of days ago. It is still in Berkeley and still going, but now a one-man show (Mac is tuff sell in industry). Anyway, they probably don't have an internet presence, but the telephone is 510-843-4341 and Harmony is still a pretty good product. I got a copy of the latest beta to play with
from the owner Maziar.

Al Pawlowski
 
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Al Pawlowski, PE

Different Greenleaf from the one that makes Harmony SCADA. However, this one (Greenleaf Software) may also be able to help with a driver.
 
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Bob_the_Engineer

This is probably a bit late to post this, but I set up a client with an HMI running on a Mac (with 3 monitors) in 1996, and it has been running flawlessly ever since. It was created with Labview. The PLC is a Modicon 984, and the communications is MODBUS RTU. I didn't use a 3rd party modbus driver, I just made my own using the Labview serial functions. Modbus is a pretty simple protocol really.

If you are still interested, I can provide more info.
 
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