Hi all, I am one of the Apache PLC4X (incubating) committers and am looking for people willing to help out with a little thing.
PLC4X is aiming at industrial programmable logic controllers. So what we are doing is similar what JDBC did in the late 90s. We’ve implemented a universal API with which we can write software to access industrial PLCs in a unified way. In contrast to OPC-UA we do not require any changes on the devices as we implement the drivers for the individual protocols as main part of the PLC4X project. We hope that this will help us use all our cool Apache software for building the next generation of Industry 4.0 solutions, as currently it’s a real problem to communicate with these little gray boxes directly. We not only work hard on the API and the matching drivers, but also on integration modules to easily use PLC4X in other frameworks. We already have full Apache Camel and Apache Edgent support. Even if we do have examples for reading and writing data from and to Kafka, we would really like to provide a Kafka-Connect adapter. This would make it super easy to communicate with industrial controllers from inside the Kafka ecosystem. I have already implemented a stub of a Kafka Connect plugin with Source and Sink partially implemented. So this stub has all the code for reading and writing via PLC4X but I am not quite that deep into Kafka that I think I should finish this implementation without professional support of the people actually knowing what they are doing on the Kafka side. So is anyone here able and willing to help with this Kafka Connect Plugin for PLC4X? Looking forward to positive responses ;-) Chris
