With the upcoming release 0.4.0 of Eclipse NeoSCADA™, the IEC 60870-5-105 implementation will finally make its way back into NeoSCADA. This will allow me to finally release the IEC 60870 component Apache Camel to Maven Central.
The Camel components for IEC 60870 are based on the NeoSCADA implementation and provide both client and server side of the protocol. Although the implementation of IEC 60870 does not implement all message types defined, all relevant types for data transmission and control are implementation and other modules can be added by an extensible mechanism, using the core layers of the protocol.
For Camel there are two endpoint types iec60870-server and iec60870-client. These allow either to offer data as IEC 60870 or to actively request data from another 60870 server.
The client component will open a connection to the remote station and initiate the data transmission. 60780 will then send updates for all addresses but the Camel component will only forward events to connected endpoints. When the connection breaks, it will be periodically tried to re-establish the connection. All event coming from the IEC connection can of course be processed with Camel.
For the server side the Camel component will hold an intern data model which can be filled using the Camel routes. In internal state will then be published to IEC clients connecting to the server instance. It also allows the use of background transmission or batching of events when required.
Now what can you actually do with IEC 60870 and Apache Camel? Well, to be honest, if you never have heard about IEC 60870 and don’t have a proper use case or specific requirement for it, then you should probably look for something different to play with ;-) IEC 60870 is used to remotely control and monitor electrical systems and power control systems (see Wikipedia page about IEC 60870-5). On the other hand, if you do want to use 60870, then the Apache Camel component can make it pretty easy to provide a data over the IEC protocol or get data out of an 60870 based system.
As routing data with Camel is easy, you can for example create a very simple Mock device in a Raspberry Pi for testing your system with an IEC component. And you can do all of this with pure open source (EPL licensed) software. You can also extract data out of your application and offer it towards another system, which explicitly requires a transmission based on IEC 60870.
When the component will be released on the next few weeks I will hopefully find the time to provide some example, showing what you can do with IEC 60870 and Apache Camel.