Using Python to query Modbus slaves

I use Python ( http://www.python.org/ ) at lot in my testing. It is a language designed to make a programmer's life easy and the computer sweat - in other words, it is an ideal tool for test scripts and maybe a bad tool for "constant use" tools.

Stock python has no serial support. For serial, you'll need some serial tool like pyserial - this hides details of OS and allows Linux (or Windows) style serial calls on either OS. A web search of pyserial will turn up a download site - such as http://pyserial.sourceforge.net/ . The "Vaults of parnassus" is another nice source for Python tools including pyserial. http://py.vaults.ca/~x/parnassus/apyllo.py/

Creating binary messages is not hard in Python, but a bit ugly. You use lots of "chr(x)" function to build up a binary string and to parse a binary response lots of "ord()". Other than that, look at the spec at http://www.blogger.com/www.modus-ida.org for details of the actual protocol.

CRC-16 for Modbus (or DF1):
Here is my CRC16 routine including a few test cases (written with no regard for CPU speed, since that is not why one uses Python).

http://www.iatips.com/crc16.py