Which type of cable for RS485 / Modbus-RTU?
communication - Is CAT5 cable good enough for RS-485 vs "true" RS-485 cable - Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange
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RS-485 communication cable
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My home automation has so far been limited to things having APIs and IP addresses. Now I want to try to connect to my heat pump which has an RS485 connection. I already bought a Waveshare RS485 to USB converter which I configured on my Raspberry Pi.
Now which type of cable should I use to connect the RS485 connectors on the heat pump board to my Waveshare converter? The length of the cable is probably going to be somewhere between 5 and 10 meters.
I thought it didn't matter that much but then Googling led me into a rabbit hole with discussions about the impedance of UTP cables with 100 Ohms where RS485 needs 120 Ohms, another one put an extra 120 Ohms resistor in between the connectors... Other discussions were about CAT5 but I only have some CAT6 and CAT6A lying around or can easily get my hands on CAT5E....
While often shielded, CAT5 can be of the UTP type, meaning unshielded twisted pair. The "true" RS-485 cable you link to has two twisted pairs and a shield. If I remember right, CAT5e (and above) has a shield, at least most cables I have seen have - the exact standard can vary. I guess those would do the job just nice. Just make sure you use the twisted pair like in the original RS-485 cable (your data sheet looks like [1 White/Orange Stripe] and [2 Orange/White Stripe] are a twisted pair, and [3 Blue/White Stripe] is a third, untwisted wire.)
There seems to be a small impedance mismatch (100 Ohms for CAT5, 120 Ohms for RS-485). This will cause reflections at the driver and at the receiver, but I am pretty sure your application will still work. While you may read that 120 Ohms is typical for RS-485, the termination network uses 120 Ohms between the differential pair and 2 * 680 Ohms to VCC and GND.
Source
Thus, the value of the termination that the cable "looks into" is smaller than 120 Ohms anyway: (120||(680+680)) Ohms = 110 Ohms.
If you have the chance to test, you could go for it. I would probably not even hesitate and use STP CAT5(e). If your contract says you pay money for every minute your installation fails, you probably want to use cables with the proper specification. (The latter will still not make sure nothing ever fails, but you're probably in a better position if you can blame it on the "true" cable instead of having someone else blaming your "wrong" cable. But you see how this last paragraph has nothing to do with physics...)
Generally speaking CAT5 s fine for RS485. IME the first limit you hit is the series resistance driving a termination over a long cable. I've run 250kbaud over 100m reliably. Things started getting shaky at around 200-300m.
What is a RS-485 communication cable equivalent to? Can I just use a shielded cable with proper gauge? Thanks for the help