Allen-Bradley PLC Control LGPL Libraries for Linux

I've always played with the idea of one day writing some libraries and maybe even a suite of tools to debug and diagnose problems on Allen-Bradley PLC's. It was never meant to be a commercial venture, but just a set of tools that would be useful at work.

But the thought of reverse engineering the protocols, and the frustration I know that would go with it, meant that I never really thought it would go past the consideration stage, or maybe a few minutes of mucking around. But today, I saw this post from Ron Gage on slashdot, who happened to mention that he had written some Programmable Logic Control Libraries. Now, to just track them down.

Here is what I found. Ron Gage has a project on freshmeat for an Allen-Bradley PCMK DH+ Driver. Cool, but it seems like it hasn't been maintained in a while. Maybe a future hobby project? Anyways, further hunting got me to this treasure trove, including an Allen-Bradley Ethernet Library (ABEL), a Real-Time Data Monitor for Control-Logix and a Framework for Data Logging with ABEL.

I'm currently downloading as I write this, although my currently (heavily) capped Unwired access is slowing me down significantly. Maybe time to SSH into home and have them download there, and I'll grab them when I'm out there tonight.