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The other thing that makes PLCs great is that they can be programmed in ladder logic, more or less visually, by technicians instead of professional programmers.
by buescher 3y ago
The other thing that makes PLCs great is that they can be programmed in ladder logic, more or less visually, by technicians instead of professional programmers. The heavy real time lifting is done for you - the “language” is a descendant of notation for relay racks.
- analog31 3y agoOddly enough, PLCs are another example of a dataflow programming being intuitive for regular people -- the others being LabVIEW and Excel. Of course I'm exaggerating a bit by putting all 3 of these tools into a single category, but I also don't think it's outrageous to make this claim. Indeed, PLC's originated with GM calling for a programmable controller that could be used without having to completely re-train their large workforce of control engineers and technicians, who were already familiar with relays, mechanical timers, switches, and so forth.
- vvanders 3y agoIt's funny, I spent a good long while in gamedev with various visual tools(UE3 Kismet[1], node/UI editors in Maya/MAX, etc). The parallels between PLC workflow and those are uncanny. Might be one of the few industries where I've seen visual hot-code reloading on-the-fly in production scenarios used at scale. The visual debugging of ladder is really similar to debugging tools we had, heck FBD[2] comes really close as well. Kind of an interesting covergent evolution of two different domains coming to very similar tools. [1] https://docs.unrealengine.com/udk/Three/KismetUserGuide.html https://docs.unrealengine.com/udk/Three/KismetUserGuide.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_block_diagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_block_diagram