Hi all, today I had a complete day of talking to people from a company interested in PLC4X and what you can do with it.
Downside is that they mainly use .Net and would be interested in a .Net based implementation … I did find DotNetty – a port of Netty to .Net … however integrating that into our build would probably be “challenging”. But they did leave with a load of new Ideas what you could do with PLC4X. I’ll treat that as success as they started out trying to convince me that OPC-UA already does all what we want. I think I managed to convince him that we do more and indeed there is a good reason for PLC4X’s existence. I’ve now heard from the second customer I had a rather intense chat with, that they use Beckhoff PLCs. These use a protocol calls ADS (German people will probably grin with that acronym). I’ve had a quick look and the protocol is a lot simpler than S7, so it should be easy to create a driver for that. We should think about implementing such a driver. The feature set is very slim. Would be a great coding exercise, if someone’s interested. Also, it would be good if someone more familiar with reading legal texts could have a look at the copyright notice at the bottom of this page (also the root of the protocol spec): https://infosys.beckhoff.com/english.php?content=../content/1033/tcadsamsspec/html/tcadsamsspec_intro.htm Another interesting thing I found out is that Beckoff PLCs are based on a software PLC called CODESYS from a company called S3. This allows running a PLC on Windows, Linux & Mac … you can extend it with Adapters so it could also speak in Modbus, Profinet, OPC-UA, … mabe it would be good to setup such a thing in Docker to act as a Integration-Test slave … but just an idea. Seams it would be possible to simulate PLCs with almost all protocols with just one System or VM. So far, the update from today … let’s see what tomorrow brings :-) Chris
