Hi all, By the way … the link to ethercat. This is a different protocol. It’s more a real-time protocol where the PLC communicates with Drives, IOs and stuff like that. Yesterday one of the people I was talking to said “You definitely don’t want to implement EntherCAT”. But you are correct, if we would implement that, we would need to become an EtherCAT member.
I just contacted Beckhoff and simply asked them what we have to do in order to be allowed to implement. The spec is super-easy and implementing this shouldn’t take longer than one or two days. We might think about purchasing a Raspberry PLC from Beckhoff … or a codesys PI PLC as the pricing is highly dependent on the power of the system it’s running on … my Mac would be a “super high performance” system and hereby probably be a “super high pricetag” license. Chris Am 17.01.18, 02:01 schrieb "Justin Mclean" <[email protected]>: Hi, > 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 I had a quick look (and I’m not a lawyer etc etc) but from what I can see it seems that as long as we respect copyright and trademarks it should be fine. You may need to take care re the patents. [1] This seem to make it clear [2] but sounds like there would be a few hoops to jump through, i.e. you may have to be a member to implement it. Some other links that may be useful; the ADS spec [3] and this source code here [4] from Beckhoff Automation which is MIT licensed. > 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 … Sounds interesting. Thanks, Justin 1, https://infosys.beckhoff.com/english.php?content=../content/1033/tcadsamsspec/html/tcadsamsspec_intro.htm 2. https://www.ethercat.org/en/faq.html#787 3. https://infosys.beckhoff.de/index.php?content=../content/1031/tc3_adscommon/html/tcadsamsspec_amstcppackage.htm&id= 4. https://github.com/Beckhoff/ADS/blob/master/LICENSE
