Appendix D. Endianness 
Synonyms: 
•  "Byte order" and "endianness" 
•  "Little endian" and "least-significant byte first" 
•  "Big endian" and "most-significant byte first" 
Endianness lies at the root of an instrument processor. It is determined by the 
processor manufacturer. A good discussion of endianness can be found at 
Wikipedia.com. Issues surrounding endianness in an instrument such as the 
CR800 datalogger are usually hidden by the operating system. However, the 
following CR800 functions bring endianness to the surface and may require some 
programming to accommodate differences: 
•  Serial input / output programming (Serial I/O: Capturing Serial Data
 (p. 
279) 
) 
•  Modbus programming (Modbus
 (p. 436) ) 
•  MoveBytes() instruction (see CRBasic Editor Help) 
•  SDMGeneric() instruction (see CRBasic Editor Help) 
•  Some PakBus instructions, like GetDataRecord (see CRBasic Editor 
Help) 
For example, when the CR1000 datalogger receives data from a CR9000 
datalogger, the byte order of a four byte IEEE4 or integer data value has to be 
reversed before the value shows properly in the CR1000. 
 Endianness in Campbell Scientific Instruments 
Little Endian Instruments  Big Endian Instruments 
CR6 datalogger 
CR9000X datalogger 
CRVW Series dataloggers 
CRS451 recording sensor 
CR200(X) Series dataloggers 
CR800 Series dataloggers 
CR1000 datalogger 
CR3000 datalogger 
CR5000 datalogger 
Use of endianness is discussed in the following sections: 
•  Section Reading Inverse-Format Modbus Registers
 (p. 440)   
•  Appendix FP2 Data Format
 (p. 557)