How Real (Floating Point) and 32-bit Data is Encoded in Modbus RTU Messages

The article discusses some of the typical difficulties encountered when handling 32-bit data types via Modbus RTU and offers practical help for solving these problems.
The point-to-point Modbus protocol is a popular choice for RTU communications if for no other reason that it’s basic convenience. The protocol itself controls the interactions of each device on a Modbus network, how device establishes a known address, how each device recognizes its messages and how basic information is extracted from the data. In essence, the protocol is the foundation of the entire Modbus network.
Such convenience does not come without some complications however, and Modbus RTU Message protocol is no exception. The protocol itself was designed based on devices with a 16-bit register length. Consequently, special considerations were required when implementing 32-bit data elements. This implementation settled on using two consecutive 16-bit registers to represent 32 bits of data or essentially 4 bytes of data. It is within these 4 bytes of data that single-precision floating point data can be encoded into a Modbus RTU message.


The Importance of Byte Order