Chris is the son of an electrical engineer and has played with industrial hardware since he was 7 years old. He also is a full-blooded open-source enthusiast, a Member of the Apache Software foundation and involved in a great number of open-source projects. In 2017 he initiated the Apache PLC4X project and since then has been working full-time on this project. Also is he very active in the Apache Incubator, mentoring projects in the IoT sector, helping to evolve the IoT landscape at the Apache Software Foundation, but also working on connecting projects beyond the boundaries of Apache, helping bring together what naturally belongs together.

In the 90s, the industry started building huge landscapes of functionality. Unfortunately, these were more or less Islands.

The products of the one automation vendor were usually incapable or unwilling to interact with products belonging to other manufacturers. Literally, thousands of protocols made connecting machinery an extremely challenging task. Most of the hardware wasn’t connected and if you wanted to connect it, you would simply be stuck with your primary vendor.

This wasn’t a big problem, until - after the emergence of Industry 4.0 - bridges were needed.

But how to solve this problem? The automation industry “quickly reacted” and provided - after only 10 years of work - a new protocol: OPC UA. However, this turned out to be quite heavy and complex, so almost in parallel, MQTT started gaining more and more traction.

Unfortunately this only covers new devices. Now, the industry is currently stuck in the dilemma of having to live with long-living machinery. A typical piece of production hardware usually has a life-span of 20 years, so what to do with the 90-95% of devices that don’t support these new protocols?

Apache PLC4X aims at solving exactly this problem.

It provides a unified API for communicating with industrial hardware using the protocols these devices natively support. Therefore there is no need to change or replace the existing hardware.

This API is available in Java and Go, but versions in Python, C, C++ and C# are being worked on. This is made possible by our code-generation framework that auto-generates more than 90% of the code needed to implement a driver.

With PLC4X we are finally able to talk to almost any piece of industrial hardware, at no license costs.

The community is also working hard on integrating PLC4X into the other ecosystems out there:

Apache: Kafka, NiFi, IoTDB, Stream-Pipes, Camel, …

Find out how we are tearing down walls and building bridges in the automation industry!

IoT Meetup-Apache PLC4X project