Modbusing In Vegas

Just spent the majority of the past week in the great city of Las Vegas. On the surface this city appears to be a thriving metropolis. Lots of shows. Lots of glitter. Lots of lights on the strip. Plenty of people.

Below the surface things are more turbulent, cautious and even desperate. The City Center mess is still a debacle. Lots of buildings with finished exteriors and empty innards. They even turn the lights on at night in some of them to pretend their occupied.

I visited Las Vegas to check up on my Bellagio fountains project. That’s a perfect project to demonstrate RTA capabilities. Obsolete, unobtainable, legacy hardware. Updating the system costs millions they don’t have. RTA saves the day with a highly tailored solution.

In this case, it was their drive systems. These drives power the motors that jet those streams of water 150 feet up into the air. The 305 fountains are the signature attraction for the hotel and people flock to their shows.

These drives were originally designed in the 70s and use a custom protocol and RS485 communications. The custom protocol was common at that time. There was very little networking to begin with and few standards. Mostly you built things that communicated with other custom stuff. A single vendor built an entire system pretty much from scratch so everything worked well and worked together.

Until it didn’t.

Ten years ago those drives went obsolete. Then the vendor stopped building them. They they became harder and harder to find until now it is simply impossible to find any.

We tailored one of our standard boxes to receive the custom protocol and ship out Modbus commands. That enabled the Bellagio to use and Modbus RTU enabled drives without having to change a single line of code or any hardware. Little cost – little resources required.

That’s the kind of solutions that you RTA builds every day. Give us a call or hit the Contact Us button on the top of the RTA Main Page to learn more.