Gateway and Direct Drivers

For certain bus systems - such as Modbus - you can sometimes find there are two distinct types of driver. A standard driver, and a gateway driver.

Standard drivers are for when there is one address (serial port or TCP/IP address, for example) for each data source. This is common when you have a large network of remote I/O modules that are accessed directly.

Gateway drivers are used when you are communicating to a number of devices that are behind a gateway of some kind.

This is most frequently found when you have a Gateway device - such as a Modbus RTU / Modbus TCP converter - that means that you are accessing multiple devices through a single address.

Gateway drivers are far more efficient for these situations, and help avoid connection limits on some hardware. However, the trade-off is that you will need to set more information when connecting your properties to data, since you'll need to provide information about which address you're connecting to on the other side of the gateway.