The integration of microprocessors in the transducer body has afforded the opportunity for adding intelligence to the transducer and for making it “pluggable” to digital communication networks. From the manufacturer’s viewpoint, the work of adding intelligence to transducers is a good investment because it adds value to the device itself. On the other hand, interfacing transducers with the wide variety of fieldbuses currently available, each with its own
protocol specifications, is a huge headache. For this reason, manufacturers tend to choose a particular fieldbus and work around it. Others decide to create a new, customized fieldbus for their products. This diversity of fieldbuses and network protocols leads a manufacturer to closed, less-flexible, and generally more-expensive solutions. The 1451 family of standards tries to solve this problem by proposing a set of standardized hardware and software interfaces that act as “plugs,” whereby the heterogeneous components can be connected and work together. This article focuses on the 1451.1 Standard (Std.) [1], which defines a software interface suitable to represent any networked smart transducer.