ConnectorIO’s Industrial Integrations for openHAB
Genesis and history
openHAB is open source project which brings a convenient integration environment for various equipments. This environment successfully supports many types of home automation devices as well as other peripherals. Thanks to openHAB’s extensible architecture, many people in the open source community have adopted it to also connect with industrial controllers. The openHAB 1.x release, apart from MQTT and Modbus, also supported Wago, Siemens Logo and Fatek controllers. The BACnet/IP integration for openHAB 1.x, which have been released in 2016, is also maintained by the community.
Modbus
To this day, many openHAB implementations are based on the Modbus protocol, which is the common denominator for many solutions. Depending on the peripherals and the specific use case, the controller or its program had to be modified so that the input and output states were available, e.g. via the Modbus TCP/IP. As Modbus as a protocol has its origins in the late 1970s, it also has drawbacks, which we will omit at this point.
At present, many manufacturers are beginning to displace MQTT and OPC UA as additional or even primary methods of driver integration. Both standards are struggling to simplify connectivity to industrial automation. Sadly they fail. MQTT, because it is primarily asynchronous transport on top of TCP/IP, OPC UA due to own weight and complexity. Finally, they are an additional layer that works above the program of the controller itself.
Apache Software Foundation and Apache PLC4X
Thanks to the Apache Software Foundation, and in particular the people and companies involved in the creation of the Apache PLC4X library, we got a better tool. We can take advantage and benefits of Apache PLC4X to integrate with wider spectrum of controllers without involving Modbus. This library allows communication with most popular controllers using their native protocols using a common programming interface (API).
Sources & Integrations - ConnectorIO
To support the development of both openHAB and Apache PLC4X, we publish sources of created integrations at GitHub connectorio-addons.
We believe that our behavior is in line with the open source spirit.
By maintaining an open license and access to sources, we allow further commercial use by other programmers and successive development of the ecosystem.
Integrations initially supported are: Siemens S7, Beckhoff ADS and BACnet/IP.
We invite you to test this solution
If you would like combine Apache PLC4X drivers and openHAB, yet do not have the programming skills required to build code from sources, we invite you to contact us. Describe your use case and purpose so we can prepare a build that fits your environment.
