Babel Buster Pro V210 Modbus to SNMP Gateway with Trap Receiver

UPDATE: We now have a newer gateway that is higher performance and lower cost than the Pro V210, and has all of the same capabilities as the Pro V210 plus some new features. Depending on which feature set is most applicable for you, you will want BB3-6101-V2C, BB3-6101-V3 or BB3-6101-V3SP.

Control Solutions’ Babel Buster® Pro-V210 is a an enhanced gateway with advanced features to support connecting Modbus RTU and TCP to SNMP v1 and v2c. The Pro-V210 also includes support for connecting devices having a proprietary serial protocol to SNMP or Modbus TCP.

The Pro-V210 includes an automatic table walker with multiple algorithms making it suitable for walking the sparse alarm table found in UPS systems implementing RFC 1628. The table walker can easily translate the alarm table into a series of Modbus coils for easy access by a PLC.

The Pro-V210 includes a trap receiver supporting both v1 and v2c traps. The template driven trap receiver provides multiple algorithms for recognizing traps, and can easily place trap information into holding registers for Modbus access. If more complex treatment of trap information is needed, such as character string interpretation, Script Basic can be used to process traps and place resulting data into Modbus registers.

The Pro-V210 allows the user to create the Modbus register set. The “registers” can be 16, 32, or 64 bit (with any registers greater than 16 bits being automatically treated as a series of Modbus registers). Holding registers can be integer, unsigned integer, or IEEE 754 floating point, single or double precision. The Pro-V210 also supports character strings as a series of registers having two ASCII characters per register. These character registers can be read and written from Script Basic as a single string variable. Although all local registers are allocated as holding registers, they can also be accessed as input registers, discrete inputs, or coils.

The Pro-V210 allows the serial port to be used for a proprietary serial protocol instead of Modbus RTU. When used for interpreting a proprietary protocol, a Script Basic program would be written to send and receive via the serial port as applicable, and interact with the local Modbus registers (and MIB variables) under user program control.

The Pro-V210 is itself an SNMP device. Local Modbus registers can be assigned to any of five branches of the local MIB for remote access by other SNMP clients. The local data may be accessed as scaled integer, 64-bit counters, 32-bit or 64-bit floating point (RFC 6340), or character strings (Octet strings) with automatic reformatting. An SNMP Get to the Pro-V210 will read local registers and an SNMP Set will write the local registers. If local registers are mapped via Modbus to write to other Modbus devices, then SNMP Set will result in writing to a Modbus device.

The Pro-V210 can send v1 or v2c traps based on threshold rules created via templates in the Pro-V210’s web UI. When data in the local registers meets the rule criteria, the trap will be sent. Traps can be triggered by reading other Modbus devices or by any other source of local data including Script Basic.

The Pro-V210 includes an SNMP client that can read and write MIB variables in other SNMP devices. When reading, the remote device’s data will be stored in a local register. When writing, data will be taken from a local register and sent to the remote SNMP device via SNMP Set.

The Pro-V210 can be Modbus RTU master or slave (user selectable), and Modbus TCP client and server (concurrently). Maps created via templates in the Pro-V210’s web UI will read and write other Modbus devices, copying their data to local registers when read, or sending data from local registers to those devices when written.

The Pro-V210 includes template based rules for simple calculations and data tests. These can be used for simple data manipulation. If more complex formula based data treatment is needed, Script Basic has access to all local registers. Reformatting from one register type to another is automatic. Therefore, a simple copy rule will transform a number into an ASCII string for use in sending traps.