3 ms·
Yeah, at my last job I had a similar realization. I went in agreeing with the conventional wisdom that you have to use ladder logic so that techs and customers
by Gracana 4y ago
Yeah, at my last job I had a similar realization. I went in agreeing with the conventional wisdom that you have to use ladder logic so that techs and customers ands other engineers can understand and work on your program. In reality, modern machinery (with networks and servo motion and smart sensors etc) is wildly complex. In seven years I didn’t meet a single customer or technician who felt comfortable making program modifications, and even qualified engineers would struggle to learn the ins and outs of an unfamiliar program. Ladder logic just didn’t provide the benefits that folks claimed were the reason we used it.
- dfox 4y agoOne thing that I have noticed is that often in the PLC projects done by seasoned automation engineers the logic that would make sense to be represented as LD is written directly as IL spaghetti code. I assume that this has to do with general unwieldiness of the LD editors in the vendors' IDEs. AFAIK the original idea behind LD is that you can do it on paper, and then hand-assemble the “bytecode” for the PLC and just manually key that into the PLC on some sort of octal/hexadecimal keypad without any kind of computer-like programming device. Obviously, this idea does not translate to present world with cheap and ubiquitous general purpose computers.