AutomationDirect Comm Driver

I have been used to using Allen-Bradley PLC's for some time and have used a little ActiveX control called SLCComm in my Visual Basic applications to communicate to Micrologix 1000's via DF1 protocol. This control was nice for small applications because I could make my application stand alone, I did not need to have RSLinx installed and running nor did I need any other kind of application running to get and recieve values from the controller into my application. This control was very inexpensive (less than $50) and worked fine for my small applications.

I am now starting to use AutomationDirect PLC's (mainly the 205 platform using 250 processors) and I was wondering if I could find a similar control using the K-Sequence protocol for around the same price or possibly (dare I say) free. I am not interested in using DDE or OPC servers because I do not want to purchase copies of these for my distributed applications. A simple DLL or ActiveX control is all I need. I thought about trying to make my own control for the K-Sequence protocol but I don't know if documentation about this protocol is available. I know that A-B made the DF1 documentation freely available, but I never tried to create my own driver. Thanks.

ZMan,

These people have one:

http://www.automatedsolutions.com/products/plcserialdirect.asp

Unfortunately, NOT CHEAP or free… But hey, one exists.

I think that this might be what you're looking for. I havn't tried it yet but it sures looks promising for the price.
vHMI Automation
Let me know if it works out.