PLC4X Browser

The PLC4X Browser is an interactive terminal application for talking to PLCs without writing any code.

You connect to a device, browse the tags it exposes and then read, write or subscribe to them.

It is written in Go and lives in the plc4x-extras repository.

Building and running

cd plc4go
go run ./tools/plc4xbrowser --demo

Or build a standalone binary:

go build -o plc4xbrowser ./tools/plc4xbrowser

The browser does not require cgo.

With --demo it starts against simulated devices, so it can be tried out without any hardware. Without the switch it talks to real devices.

Commands

Inside the application, help lists the available commands:

Every driver shipped by plc4go can be registered. The protocol code used by register and discover is the same code the connection string uses, for example s7, modbus-tcp, ads, bacnet-ip, knxnet-ip, opcua or umas.

Since a serial connection string has no host, a serial port is named in the path instead:

modbus-rtu:///dev/ttyUSB0
firmata:///dev/ttyACM0

Configuration

The browser stores its configuration as YAML in the user’s config directory. It remembers the last ten commands, the last ten hosts, the log level and which drivers to register automatically on startup.

Stopping things

Ctrl+C aborts the operation that is currently running rather than ending the session, so a read hanging on an unreachable device can be cancelled without losing the open connections. With nothing running it offers to quit; q, Ctrl+D and the typed quit command exit as well.