At Hallam-ICS, we often talk about our great culture, and what company culture is complete without a competitive fantasy football league? For half the year, it provides fodder for water cooler talk, friendly rivalries, and even a reason to watch Browns games in December.

Modbus communication protocol was developed in 1979, and almost 40 years later, it is still used on many industrial sites. It is pretty cool that this openly published, free, simple protocol has been adopted by so many manufacturers to exchange information. It passes 16-bit words over a network that can be formatted however the manufacturer sees fit (unsigned, signed, real), as long as the master and the slave device have agreed ahead of time what format the word(s) will take.