Hi Chris, thank you for the quick response of the current development timeline!
We are still in an early stage of our product so this does fit for us and I very happy to be able to help you with testing of the new ADS driver. Please let me know if I can help else. My background is Java backend development for 15 years (after some years of C++) , mainly with OSGi, Spring, Hibernate, PostgreSQL, MDD/MDA. I'm not a PLC developer myself but working together with very experienced PLC developers. Good to hear that Beckhoff provided you a device and thus is supporting the project. Besides their closed source Windows developments they are working on platform independent open source drivers as well for C++ ( https://github.com/Beckhoff/ADS) and .NET Core ( https://www.nuget.org/packages/Beckhoff.TwinCAT.Ads/5.0.0-preview4). But for me a community driven project not limited to one protocol makes far more sense, as you described as well in the current Linux Magazin :-) ( https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2020/03/sps-und-edge/). Nice article by the way! Regards, Jens Am Fr., 21. Feb. 2020 um 14:13 Uhr schrieb Christofer Dutz < [email protected]>: > Hi Jens, > > also a nice and warm welcome from me too. > > Perhaps I can give you some insight on the status of the ADS driver or the > drivers in general. > > We currently have 2 important branches. > > 1) In the rel/0.6 branch we have the old drivers. Old is relative, but the > main point with all of them is that they are all manually implemented and > some require external libraries. > > 2) In the develop branch we have a new generation of drivers. These are > all formally specified with specs and 90% of the code is generated by a > code-generator we built. Currently we are working hard on porting all old > drivers to the new type. The ADS driver was initially built by a colleague > and project member which is currently a little less available. Therefore > the port hasn't progressed to a level that it's usable at all. The old > driver we did some testing against a device Beckhoff kindly provided us > with but we have never used it in production. However I know the Beckhoff > driver is important and I`ll definitely address finishing an initial port > of this driver as soon as I'm finished with creating the unit- and > integration-test suite. > > I would expect a first new version to be available for testing in perhaps > a month or so. It would definitively help having you on board for testing, > tuning and improving our implementation. Your involvement would be very > highly appreciated. > > Chris > > > Am 21.02.20, 12:53 schrieb "Julian Feinauer" < > [email protected]>: > > Hi Jens, > > first, welcome and nice to have you here! > Second, cool that you have a Karaf backend... I would love to have one > __ > > And now regarding your questions... We use PLC4X in prod, meaning on > several large machines from different industries on the plants (core > shooters, saws, ...). > So yes its still early in the project and sometimes you have to adjust > things a bit but you can run it on the Shopfloor (but not an a raspberry > pi... this is something we learned... : ) ). > > We abandoned our own "home grown" code and joined the project as we > had the same issues with our own code base and it just makes more sense to > collaborate on that. > From the community side I think we could consider a hangout or "web > meetout" to talk a bit about that or I can offer that myself or @Tim Mitsch > have a Teams call with you and show you a bit of what we do it and give > you a bit of background of our exact usages in real plants. > > Hope that helps you a bit : ) > > Julian > > Am 21.02.20, 12:49 schrieb "[email protected]" < > [email protected]>: > > Hi PLC4X developers, > > I'm working for a manufacturer of packaging machines in northern > Germany using Beckhoff PLCs only. In order to gather data for a > condition monitoring solution from our fast running machines (our > fastest PLCs have cycle times of 1ms) we are looking for a library > enabling us to access the PLC remotely as fast as possible (via > ADS) > from a Java runtime running wihtin a (Docker) container. PLC4X > looks > like a perfect match for us! It has a nice API supporting > different PLC > protocols (Rockwell EtherNet/IP might be required by our product as > well in the future) , supports OSGi to be used in our Karaf based > backend and is a fully java implementation to be used in a Linux > environment. > > During the last days we did some tests to check the support of > elemental data types mandatory for our first product and found some > limitations, e.g.: > - writing variables seems not to work at all. As far as I > understoud a > field encoder seems not be implemented at all > - reading of arrays and structure is not implemented yet > - reading of multiple variables via one single request results in > timeouts > - read floating values results in incorrect values > > This is ok as the version number of PLC4X and "limited" > documentation > do indicate the early state of the whole library. What we would > like to > know: > Is PLC4x ready for production use and does somebody still work on > the > ADS support (the related Jira issues are updated months ago)? > > Since we are very interested in PLC4X and I'm personally > interested in > OpenSource development, I would even like to help with > contributions. > > Kind regrads, > Jens Vagts > > > > > > >
