Ansible roles and playbooks for PLCnext

Roles and playbooks to provision a PLCnext Control AXC F 3152 from Phoenix Contact.

Introduction

PLCnext is a new generation of PLCs from Phoenix Contact. Their OS is Linux based, with a real-time kernel patch.

At codecentric we used PLCnext Controllers to power out smart distancing solution, SmartDistancR, which is a Python application that can calculate the distance between people in a video feed area. The application requires an EdgeTPU accelerator for close to real-time detection and a network camera. The computed results can be published to a MQTT broker.

While working with PLCnext Linux, we found that we were performing some repetitive tasks when setting up new and managing existing controllers, so we created these roles and playbooks to help us save time and reduce the potential for errors when configuring new controllers, so that we can focus on application development instead of hunting down configuration issues.

Roles

Role	Description
`common`	Common tasks for all PLCnext Controllers, like setting defaults.
`ntp`	Configure `ntpd` for setting the time and date.
`pip`	Install `pip`.
`docker`	Install `docker` and `docker-compose`.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

In order to use these roles and playbooks, you should have read the following documents:

Other Resources