Industrial Interfaces & Signal Sources

Simple Network Management Protocol is a standard way to read status, counters, health information and configuration from networked equipment.

Modbus is a simple request/response protocol that exposes coils and numeric registers. Modbus TCP carries it over Ethernet; Modbus RTU commonly carries it over RS-485.

OPC Unified Architecture is a platform-independent industrial interoperability standard that exposes typed data, metadata, events and object relationships through a structured information model.

PLC tags are named controller variables representing inputs, outputs, setpoints, timers, counters, process values and machine state.

EtherNet/IP carries the Common Industrial Protocol (CIP) over standard Ethernet and is widely used for controller, drive, I/O and device communication.

PROFINET is an industrial Ethernet standard designed for deterministic controller-to-device communication, diagnostics and plant automation.

PROFIBUS is a mature industrial fieldbus family used for controller-to-device communication, especially in long-lived automation and process installations.

BACnet is an open protocol for building automation and control systems, organizing points and device objects for HVAC, power and facility systems.

SAE J1939 is a higher-level protocol built on CAN and widely used in heavy vehicles, engines and mobile industrial equipment.

CANopen is a higher-level CAN protocol with standardized object dictionaries, communication objects and device profiles.

Distributed Network Protocol 3 is designed for reliable telemetry between control centers and remote field equipment, particularly in electric and water utilities.

IEC 61850 defines data models and communication services for protection, control and automation in electrical substations.

Inter-Integrated Circuit is a shared two-wire serial bus using clock and data lines to connect multiple addressed devices.

Serial Peripheral Interface uses a clock plus separate data lines and chip-select signals for fast full-duplex communication with local peripherals.

UART is a basic asynchronous serial interface that sends bytes over transmit and receive lines without a shared clock.

1-Wire is a low-speed bus that can address multiple devices over a single data conductor plus ground, with some devices able to parasitically power themselves.

General-purpose input/output pins represent simple digital states such as on/off, pulse, contact closure or logic-level control.

USB HID and CDC are common device classes for human-interface devices and serial-like communication over USB.

RS-232 and RS-485 are electrical standards used to carry serial data. RS-232 is commonly point-to-point; RS-485 supports differential signaling and multidrop networks over longer distances.

Controller Area Network is a robust message-based bus designed for multiple electronic control units to communicate reliably in electrically noisy environments.

MQTT is a lightweight broker-based publish/subscribe messaging protocol designed for telemetry and devices that may have limited bandwidth or intermittent connectivity.

REST-style APIs expose resources and operations over HTTP using standard methods and structured payloads such as JSON.

WebSockets provide a long-lived bidirectional connection that lets servers push updates without repeated polling.

Syslog is a standard way for systems and network devices to send timestamped event and diagnostic messages to a collector.

Redfish is a modern RESTful hardware-management standard; IPMI is an older platform-management interface used for out-of-band monitoring and control.

Operating systems expose CPU, memory, storage, process, network, thermal, service and kernel state through standard local interfaces.

GPU and accelerator SDKs expose utilization, clocks, memory, thermals, power, errors and runtime state through vendor-specific APIs and tools.

Device logs are vendor or application event records that capture faults, warnings, state transitions, restarts and diagnostic details.

Controller diagnostics include fault codes, module state, communication errors, task status, scan timing and hardware health exposed by PLCs and automation controllers.