i-7188EX/£gPAC-7186EX series programmable Modbus Gateway
Modbus is very wide known protocol in the industrial manufacturing and environment monitoring fields. It is suit master-slave or query-response distributed I/O applications. The unit is pre-installed a Modbus gateway firmware. Therefore PC, HMI or PLC can use Modbus/TCP or Modbus/RTU protocol to communicate with I/O modules that uses Modbus/RTU protocol and link to any COM port of the gateway.
Besides the gateway functionality, it is also a c language based programmable controller that equipped a DOS-like OS (MiniOS7). Users can use C compilers that can create 16 bit executable file (*.exe) to develop a program then download it to the controller. That let the controller work stand-alone. There are two free charge version compilers ( Turbo C 2.0 and Turbo C++ 1.01 ), we suggest users to use the Turbo C++ 1.01.
Using the software development toolkits that we provide can customize the firmware. The SDK provides rich functions for Modbus communication, such as Modbus/TCP master/slave, Modbus/RTU master/salve, Modbus/ASCII master, ... etc. Further more, calling relative COM port functions (such as IsCom, ReadCom, ToCom,...etc), you can convert other non-standard protocol to Modbu/TCP or Modbus/RTU. That is to say, the controller can be a protocol converter, too.
