I want to announce the release of a project that I have been working on in the past months: profirust is a PROFIBUS-DP compatible communication stack written in Rust!
On my quest to dive deeper and deeper into the industrial automation world, it was inevitable for me to explore the various fieldbus protocols at some point. Especially for supporting my increasingly complex machinery, I wanted to look into a robust and scalable fieldbus solution. PROFIBUS uses purple cabling so naturally I felt like this was the option I had to choose.
As there are few to no existing open-source projects implementing a fully capable PROFIBUS communication stack, this looked like a promising niche to fill and an interesting challenge to attempt solving.
Accompanying the release of profirust, a PROFIBUS-DP compatible communication stack, I want to provide an introduction to PROFIBUS in general.
While PROFIBUS is quite dated at this point, there are still massive amounts of PROFIBUS installations in service around the world. It's also quite interesting to dig into this bus protocol from a historical perspective — to understand where modern industrial protocols originate from.