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
