In the olden days everything was controlled using hand-made custom cabling and proprietary data formats. In the industrial world at least, however, this kind of thing is long gone: now entire systems are based instead around fully-featured bus architectures. As well as the obvious advantages of easier maintainability and expandability there are other reasons to prefer such an approach. For example, a widespread industry standard ensures the long-term availability of hardware and software components, at least to some degree. In this article we will take a look at AS-Interface.