Beckhoff ADS Protocol

[Christofer Dutz <ch...@c-ware.de>]

Hi all,

as in my chats with companies in the production-industry I was told that Beckhoff is used quite a lot, we have prioritized the Beckhoff ADS protocol.
Sebastian is currently working on this.

In order to test the driver however we need some PLC to talk to. Luckily Beckhof uses a Soft SPS called TwinCAT … the version 3 is the latest one.
It is possible to register at Beckhoff and download this and use for free. The only downside is that you have to enter some 5 digit captcha code once a week. I think for a starting point, this is an acceptable thing. For a full-blown integration-test environment we’ll think of ways to purchase the full thing.

The Beckhoff TwinCAT 3 XAE can be downloaded from here:
https://www.beckhoff.de/default.asp?download/tc3-download-xae.htm

They also have several examples available (Mainly for .NET):
https://infosys.beckhoff.com/content/1031/tc3_adssamples_net/html/twincat.ads.setuptc3.htm?id=9184847450292964729

Also I have asked for formal permission to implement the driver using the spec. They were a little surprised as we seem to be the first to ask … but he did agree that it does say “You gotta ask”. Well we will probably receive this permission soon :-)

Chris