I have no experience with the piPLCs, I was not even aware of them and never seen them being used in industrial environment, but they might just be a new addition to the family. Regardless, they might be good candidates for development purposes.
The company where I was working used Siemens, Beckhoff and Schnedier (I have no experience with that) equipment, and I was also developing in .Net. The most obvious reason for this is that both the Siemens and Beckhoff development environments and HMIs are windows based (WinCC, Step7, TIA, TwinCAT...). As a result most of the commissioned control systems are built on windows. Also, the official S7 library (prodave), the free Beckhoff ADS library, the official OPC libraries and even most open source libraries (Snap7) all have .Net wrappers or bindings. This makes .Net the most convenient choice for many companies. This does not mean that there is no demand for alternatives. More and more companies start to realize that the support period of the Microsoft OSes are much shorter than the lifespan of their control systems and security patches are often not backported to previous versions. I have heard about multiple (fairly recent) projects that aim to implement SCADA and DCS software on Linux. Cheers, Gym On Wed, Jan 17, 2018 at 4:21 PM, Christofer Dutz <[email protected]> wrote: > Ok … so I am beginning to see a pattern here … > > This is now the third company using S7 and Beckhoff controllers. So, I > guess it does make sense to prioritize the ADS protocol implementation. > Let’s see what Beckhoff support answers to my request regarding using > their spec to implement a driver. > > Unfortunately, again this was a company that seems to be fully in the hand > of Microsoft, so they too were asking for a .Net driver. > > Well let’s hope some folks interested in implementing a .Net version of > PLC4X will join our team soon. > > Chris > > > > Am 16.01.18, 18:21 schrieb "Christofer Dutz" <[email protected]>: > > 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 > > >
