Data Normalization in IIoT: Handling Register Formats, Byte Ordering, and Scaling Factors [2026]
· 11 min read
Every IIoT engineer eventually faces the same rude awakening: you've got a perfectly good Modbus connection to a PLC, registers are responding, data is flowing — and every single value is wrong.
Not "connection refused" wrong. Not "timeout" wrong. The insidious kind of wrong where a temperature reading of 23.5°C shows up as 17,219, or a pressure value oscillates between astronomical numbers and zero for no apparent reason.
Welcome to the data normalization problem — the unsexy, unglamorous, absolutely critical layer between raw industrial registers and usable engineering data. Get it wrong, and your entire IIoT platform is built on garbage.