Raylux 0.30.0: CLICK PLUS driver, Linux and ARM64

Two new capabilities: a new PLC family, and Linux, including the Raspberry Pi.

AutomationDirect CLICK and CLICK PLUS

CLICK PLUS speaks Modbus TCP, so it never needed a protocol driver of its own. What it needed was a translation from the names an engineer actually authors in the CLICK software onto Modbus addresses. Two driver types do that, for network and serial.

The address table is vendor-confirmed. AutomationDirect publishes no CLICK-to-Modbus map — the manual tells you to read it out of the programming software. That export was taken and validated against all 12,340 addressable rows with no mismatches.

Worth knowing if you author CLICK tags:

• Leave word order set to little-endian, the default for these drivers. CLICK orders 32-bit values low word first; on the usual setting every 32-bit value decodes to a plausible wrong number with no error anywhere.
• Inputs, timers and counters are read-only, and writes to them are refused.
• Input and output points are not contiguous — two banks of 16 per hundred. Addresses that are not real points are rejected rather than quietly mapped to a neighbour.
• Text registers are not supported, because two characters share a register and no single Modbus address can express that.

Linux, including the Raspberry Pi

The gateway builds and passes its full test suite on Linux for the first time, on both Intel and ARM64.

A single apt install is the whole procedure: it creates the service account, installs the service, and starts the gateway. Non-interactive, so it works over SSH and from a provisioning script.

It installs to /opt/raylux because it bundles its own Python runtime, and gateway data stays at /var/lib/raylux — removing or even purging the package leaves your data alone, the same guarantee the Windows installer makes.

Fixed

Five of these only surfaced by packaging and installing, because every test runs from a writable directory with a configuration it just wrote.

• A configuration written with the older spelling of one section was silently ignored from the second start onwards. A gateway deliberately bound to localhost came back on every interface; an HTTPS-only deployment resumed serving plain HTTP. Silently, with no error.
• Three settings were resolved relative to the service's working directory. One killed the gateway at startup, one silently broke history, and one made licence activation impossible on any packaged install — the gateway accepted and validated the licence, then wrote it somewhere it would never read.
• The licence page showed hardware details as absent on every platform since that page was written. Detection had been working the whole time.
• The packaged Linux service runs at a sensible log level. The default writes a line per second per system tag, which is real flash wear on a Pi.

Not verified at this release

• The CLICK driver had not yet spoken to a physical PLC. Addressing was confirmed against the vendor's own tool and the wire behaviour against a simulator.
• The ARM64 build had only run under emulation, which is strong evidence about portability and weak evidence about timing.