Hi Tom, Welcome here and that would indeed be wonderful if you folks would decide to join forces with us.
The dotnet part of plc4x never really took off. I think it's was based on someone wanting to contribute and me helping him many years ago. However that contributor disappeared and we never got far. I would be happy to help you folks migrate your stuff over. Especially for Mitsubishi we just recently had an initiative to get started. With our mspec approach, protocol work nicely propagates to the other languages. If you need any help, let me know. Post path to get started would be a draft pr as that allow us to join in and leave comments. Chris Gesendet von Outlook für Android<https://aka.ms/AAb9ysg> ________________________________ From: Tom NewChao <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, 24 July 2026 14:35:12 To: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: Introduction ― building plc4net S7/Modbus drivers for our IIoT edge gateway, hardware validation offer, and openIndu Hi all, I'm TomNewChao, founder of the openIndu community (https://www.openindu.com/, code at https://github.com/openIndu). 1) We'd like to build S7/Modbus support into plc4net, not just consume PLC4X. Our IIoT platform (https://www.openindu.com/iiot-platform) has a Java/Spring Boot backend, but the layer that actually talks to shop-floor PLCs -- our edge gateway -- is a separate C# service, and today it hand-rolls its own S7, Modbus, Omron FINS, and Mitsubishi/Keyence MC-protocol parsing. We'd like to stop maintaining that in isolation and build on PLC4X instead. I noticed plc4net currently only ships a KNXnet/IP driver, and its shared driver SPI only landed about six weeks ago, so S7/Modbus for .NET looks like a genuinely open gap rather than something we'd be duplicating. We already have working, production-tested C# implementations of these protocols, and would like to contribute real plc4net drivers built against the new SPI. 2) We can offer real PLC hardware for validation, independent of #1. We run production lines across Siemens, Mitsubishi, Omron, Keyence, and Inovance (汇川) equipment. I also noticed the SLMP/MELSEC driver on the plc4j side just landed (#2585 -> #2640 -> #2651) -- happy to validate that against our real Mitsubishi/Keyence hardware too, even though our own gateway is C#. As we roll out to more factories we keep encountering more brands and firmware variants, so this can be an ongoing hardware-validation channel for PLC4X generally, not limited to plc4net or to what we're building ourselves. 3) Introducing openIndu. We're an open, community-run project focused on smart manufacturing -- motion control, machine vision, this IIoT platform, and some AI-infrastructure work, developed in the open at https://github.com/openIndu. We're still a young community, but we'd rather build industrial protocol connectivity on an established open project than reinvent it, which is a big part of why PLC4X specifically is interesting to us beyond the technical fit. Happy to open a GitHub issue for the driver proposal specifically (in the spirit of #2585) once this gets some traction here, if that's the preferred way to track it -- just let me know. My GitHub handle is TomNewChao (https://github.com/TomNewChao). Best, TomNewChao Founder, openIndu Community https://www.openindu.com/ ・ https://github.com/openIndu
