The HART Communication Protocol (Highway Addressable Remote Transducer) is a hybrid analog+digital industrial automation open protocol. Its most notable advantage is that it can communicate over legacy 4–20 mA analog instrumentation current loops, sharing the pair of wires used by the analog-only host systems. HART is widely used in process and instrumentation systems ranging from small automation applications up to highly sophisticated industrial applications. Based on the

OSI model The Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model is a reference model developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) that "provides a common basis for the coordination of standards development for the purpose of systems inter ...

, HART resides at Layer 7, the Application Layer. Layers 3–6 are not used. When sent over 4–20 mA it uses a

Bell 202 The Bell 202 modem was an early (1976) modem standard developed by the Bell System. It specifies audio frequency-shift keying (AFSK) to encode and transfer data at a rate of 1200 bits per second (bit/s), half-duplex. It has separate sets of circu ...

for layer 1. But it is often converted to RS485 or RS232. According to Emerson,Emerson ''https://web.archive.org/web/20181107104043/https://www.automation.com/automation-news/industry/emerson-proves-advancements-in-eddl-electronic-device-description-language-technology'', rev. 2005-04-14 due to the huge installation base of 4–20 mA systems throughout the world, the HART Protocol is one of the most popular industrial protocols today. HART protocol has made a good transition protocol for users who wished to use the legacy 4–20 mA signals, but wanted to implement a "smart" protocol.

History

The protocol was developed by

Rosemount Inc. Rosemount Inc. is a subsidiary of Emerson Electric Company. Its headquarters is located in Shakopee, Minnesota, where they manufacture measurement instrumentation such as pressure, temperature, level, DP flow, and wireless, as well as analytical ...

, built off the

early communications standard in the mid-1980s as a proprietary digital communication protocol for their smart field instruments. Soon it evolved into HART and in 1986 it was made an

open protocol An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a common prerequisite that open standards use an open license that provides for extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in their development due to ...

. Since then, the capabilities of the protocol have been enhanced by successive revisions to the specification.

Modes

There are two main operational modes of HART instruments: point-to-point (analog/digital) mode, and multi-drop mode.

Point to point

In point-to-point mode the digital signals are overlaid on the 4–20 mA loop current. Both the 4–20 mA current and the digital signal are valid signalling protocols between the controller and measuring instrument or final control element. The

polling Poll, polled, or polling may refer to: Forms of voting and counting * Poll, a formal election ** Election verification exit poll, a survey taken to verify election counts ** Polling, voting to make decisions or determine opinions ** Polling pla ...

address of the instrument is set to "0". Only one instrument can be put on each instrument cable signal pair. One signal, generally specified by the user, is specified to be the 4–20 mA signal. Other signals are sent digitally on top of the 4–20 mA signal. For example, pressure can be sent as 4–20 mA, representing a range of pressures, and temperature can be sent digitally over the same wires. In point-to-point mode, the digital part of the HART protocol can be seen as a kind of

digital current loop interface For serial communications, a current loop is a communication interface that uses current instead of voltage for signaling. Current loops can be used over moderately long distances (tens of kilometres), and can be interfaced with optically isola ...

Multi-drop

In multi-drop mode the analog loop current is fixed at 4 mA and it is possible to have more than one instrument on a signal loop. HART revisions 3 through 5 allowed polling addresses of the instruments to be in the range 1–15. HART revision 6 allowed addresses 1 to 63; HART revision 7 allows addresses 0 to 63. Each instrument must have a unique address.

Packet structure

The request HART packet has the following structure:

Preamble

Currently all the newer devices implement five byte preamble, since anything greater reduces the communication speed. However, masters are responsible for backwards support. Master communication to a new device starts with the maximum preamble length (20 bytes) and is later reduced once the preamble size for the current device is determined. Preamble is: "ff" "ff" "ff" "ff" "ff" (5 times ff)

Start delimiter

This byte contains the Master number and specifies that the communication packet is starting. ;bit 7, if high use Unique (5 byte) address, else use Polling (1 Byte) addresses. ;bit 6 and 5, Number of Expansion bytes: normally it set if Expansion field is used, normally 0. ;bit 4 and 3, Physical layer type: 0=Asynchronous,
1=Synchronous ;bit 2, 1 and 0, Frame type: 1=BACK Burst Acknowledge send by Burst-mode Device
2=STX Master to Field Devices.
6=Slave Acknowledge to STX frame.

Address

Specifies the destination address as implemented in one of the HART schemes. The original addressing scheme used only four bits to specify the device address, which limited the number of devices to 16 including the master. The newer scheme utilizes 38 bits to specify the device address. This address is requested from the device using either Command 0, or Command 11.

Command

This is a one byte numerical value representing which command is to be executed. Command 0 and Command 11 are used to request the device number.

Number of data bytes

Specifies the number of communication data bytes to follow.

Status

The status field is absent for the master and is two bytes for the slave. This field is used by the slave to inform the master whether it completed the task and what its current health status is.

Data

Data contained in this field depends on the command to be executed.

Checksum

Checksum A checksum is a small-sized block of data derived from another block of digital data for the purpose of detecting errors that may have been introduced during its transmission or storage. By themselves, checksums are often used to verify dat ...

is composed of an XOR of all the bytes starting from the start byte and ending with the last byte of the data field, including those bytes.

Manufacturer codes

Each manufacturer that participates in the HART convention is assigned an identification number. This number is communicated as part of the basic device identification command used when first connecting to a device.

References

External links

FieldComm Group

.NET Open Source project
{{Authority control Network protocols Industrial computing Serial buses Industrial automation