The domain of automation industry is characterised by a highly proprietary environment. Different platforms and different tools are in use. In most cases there is no interoperability between different solutions of different vendors. The standard IEC 61131-3 provides a very small basis for common modelling of control programs, but platforms and tools are not able to interoperate. Several steps to improve this situation have been undertaken by the PLCopen. The new standard IEC 61499 has even more ambitious objectives. Framework for Distributed Industrial Automation and Control, the general idea of the 4DIAC initiative is to provide such an open framework for the IEC 61499, an open standard for distributed control and automation that gives the opportunity to establish an automation and control environment based on the three main targets;

The following two open source projects are in the focus of the 4DIAC initiative:

• FORTE (4DIAC-RTE): modular IEC 61499 compliant Runtime Environment for small embedded devices (16/32 Bit), implemented in C++. It provides the execution of basic function blocks, composite function blocks, and service interface function blocks. The following two versions are supported: A PC based version tested on i386 (Cygwin and Linux) and PPC (Linux), and an embedded ARM7 based version;
• 4DIAC-IDE: modular IEC 61499 compliant Integrated Engineering Environment based on the Eclipse open tool framework (This allows that other plug-ins can easily be applied to the 4DIAC-IDE providing new or extended functionality), for modelling distributed control applications with IEC 61499. A hardware capability definition allows the modelling of control hardware and its interconnections through networks. The modelled applications can be downloaded to distributed field device according the means defined by the IEC 61499 standard.

More details can be found here.

             

AVR32 is a fairly new 32bit microcontroller core developed by Atmel. Design goals were high integration, low power consumption and a modern 32bit instruction set. Fortunately, Atmel decided to implement an AVR32 backend for the GCC compiler collection and to base the AVR32Studio IDE on Eclipse which is a Java application, so that high-quality development software is for free for GNU/Linux. Whether you would like to use a fancy IDE like Eclipse or prefer to work with Makefiles and an editor, the AVR32 GNU utils are your friends. AVR32 Studio is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for developing AVR32 applications. AVR32 Studio provides a complete set of features including project management and version control integration (CVS); a C/C++ editor with syntax highlighting and code completion; a debugger supporting run control including source and instruction-level stepping and breakpoints; registers, memory and I/O views; and target configuration and management. AVR32 Studio integrates with the GNU Toolchain for AVR32. The GNU C Compiler (GCC) is used for compiling C/C++ programs, while the GNU debugger (GDB) is used for debugging the application on target.

           

The KontrollerLab (the old plan called XAvrTools) is an IDE for developing software for Atmel(r) AVR(c) microcontrollers development easier using Linux. The KontrollerLab uses these tools to make developing easier:

• avr-gcc and helper programs to compile the C files, link the object files, and assemble the ASM files;
• uisp a tool for AVR (and AT89S) microcontrollers which can interface to many hardware in-system programmers. UISP allows you to program your microcontroller through the parallel (or serial) port of your computer, and avrdude (AVR Downloader UploaDEr is a program for downloading and uploading the on-chip memories of Atmel's AVR microcontrollers. It can program the Flash and EEPROM. Where supported by the serial programming protocol, it can program fuse and lock bits. AVRDUDE also supplies a direct instruction mode, allowing one to issue any programming instruction to the AVR chip regardless of whether AVRDUDE implements that specific feature of a particular chip...and his GUI Gnome-AVRDUDE for Gnome desktop environment) to upload and download the programs;
• Built-in debugger for PC-only and in-circuit debugging;
• Serial terminal embedded in the IDE to ease debugging;
• Kate as the editor embedded in the IDE.

You can download source code from here (SVN version) and many package for various GNU/Linux distributions here. For more information and tutorial click here.