Hi all, today I had my second visit at the SPS IPC Drives in Nürnberg. It’s one of the world’s biggest (if not even THE biggest industry fair on everything in industrial automation). Last year people treated me with sort of an attitude of being someone with really strange point of view. This was with the first line of PLC4X being about 1-2 months old. This year people (even sales guys) seem to have gotten used to the industry. I wouldn’t say that’s our work, but at least things seem to be changing.
Also I visited all the big PLC vendors for my annual “Who’s an Ass and who’s not” ranking ;-) Last year most of the companies in business for over 50 years were on the red side of the list. This year, the worst I got was a: “But we don’t want you to do that” from Rockwell. On the Opposite side, I have to mention: Beckhoff and Phoenix Contact. These were extremely kind and seem to have adopted and embraced the idea of Open-Source. The other ones that were “just nice to me” were: * Festo * Rexroth * Codesys * ABB * Schneider Electric Also I had a talk with one of the Profinet guys. The takeaway from that was, that we don’t need to become a member in order to be allowed to implement a driver. We can simply purchase the Specs. If we want to actively communicate (Active-Mode Driver) we need a vendor-id, but we could get that for free too. I was asked to contact the guy I talked with after the fair and he would send me all needed information. The only thing we are not allowed to do without a membership is use the ProfiNet Logo … guess I can live with that. So guess there’s nothing preventing us from implementing a ProfiNet driver. :-) Also did I do a quick summary of which protocols we would need to talk to the different types of PLCs: * Rockwell: Ethernet/IP * Phoenix Contact: Ethernet/IP, Modbus-TCP, ProfiNet * Festo: Ethernet/IP, Modbus-TCP, ProfiNet * Pilz: Modbus-TCP * Beckhoff: ADS. OPC-UA * Rexroth: OCI (MLPI for PLCs, EAL for Drives) * Codesys: Codesys (Profinet, OPC-UA, Modbus, via plugins) * ABB: Codesys, Profinet, Modbus-TCP * Schneider Electric: Modbus-TCP (simple PLCs), EtherNet/IP (Controll Systems) So it seems implementing ProfiNet, Codesys and OPC-UA would increase the coverage even more. So far my summary … Chris
