Interesting chat with Phoenix Contact

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

Hi all,

I just wanted to report what we discussed in a meeting with someone from Phoenix Contact.

Currently they seem to be pushing their next generation of PLCs into the market … they are called PLCNext (how creative 😉 )
But I really liked the concept. In general it’s a real-time capable Debian installation and on the system you can run typical SPS programs.
However you can also run C++ written SPS programs. Both communicate with each other via some shared memory. In this shared memory
The system … well … shares memory, but also the state of the IO elements.

It seems the PLCNext doesn’t support any proprietary protocols but a bunch of our usual suspects.

But one thing that I think is extremely interesting for us:

  *   They support C++
  *   They have a C++ library for directly accessing the shared memory
  *   They allow providing modules in their “Appstore”

So I had the idea, that we could write a module in C++, that uses their lib to interface with the PLC shared memory, use a Thrift client to communicate with the outside world and implement a “plc4x” protocol, that simply uses thrift to send over PLC4X API calls.

Then a user could simply install the module and have super performant and 100% PLC4X support for all PLC4X features in the PLC.

I guess this concept could be applied to other vendors with a similar concept.

At least they will be sending us a demo Setup with a time-limited donation of Hard- and Software which we’ll add to the IoT-Lab in Franfurt so you can all access it.

I really like the idea of implementing this Thrift (or any other) framework for native PLC4X communication. Might help us get into PLCs we couldn’t otherwise or only with pain.


Chris