Despite the growing popularity of demand based ventilation systems, which utilizes sensors to determine the ventilation needs, manual ventilation systems are still considered popular. At the design stage of a ventilation system, an important decision is the choice between a simpler manual control via potentiometers or a fully automated control system with sensors that often make manual setting very difficult.

Traditionally, potentiometers, despite their widespread use in almost every ventilation application, were considered as very simple devices with rather limited capabilities. The new SDP-M010 series from Sentera, however, through the use of Modbus RTU, significantly increases the available options regarding ventilation control, both for smaller systems of a single potentiometer – fan pair or for large systems with multiple served rooms and sensors.

The new SDP-M010 potentiometer series, expands the communication capabilities of standard potentiometer through the support of the Modbus RTU communication protocol. The Modbus RTU allows the user to set the potentiometer, read its position and overwrite its output from SenteraWeb or the Building Management System (BMS). These features are additional to the standard features of Sentera’s potentiometers that allow you to set minimum and maximum limits, to set low and high speed through 3 available output options (0-10V, 0-20mA or PWM)

Modbus RTU potentiometers

Sentera's Modbus RTU potentiometers offer numerus additional options that can be set through the Modbus registers:

• Direction of rotation from minimum to maximum or vice versa
• Adjustable minimum and maximum output value
• Output signal type (0-10 VDC, 0-20 mA, 0-100% PWM)
• Modbus communication timeout
• Read out potentiometer’s output
• Overwrite Modbus RTU output