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Arduino PLC IDE
- LtWorf 2y agoHaha omg why!! My dad had an industrial machine and he coherced the maker to give him the sources and it was done with this versapro thing. Graphical environment + a gazillion of memory bugs because there were no variables, just memory addresses, and you were supposed to remember how many numbers to skip, depending on the size of the variable.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoI don't see what they they think the market is for pseudo-industrial hardware that lacks the bare minimum of ESD protection and terminations. And they want suckers to pay a premium for their black PCBs that have nothing about them to justify the cost.
- sgt 2y agoProbably for folks who want to play around with PLC
- dfox 2y agoThe only reason why you want to use PLC is that the fact that the hardware is generally robust and has industrial IO interfaces offsets the totally horrible developer experience of IEC 61131-3.
- sgt 2y agoDoesn't sound like a great way to be spending one's days. Is there another type of PLC developer experience that is superior? I don't know much about PLC.
- buescher 2y agoThe PLC developer experience makes it possible for average technicians to do some things (like, things people typically use PLCs for) in days that would take average embedded C programmers weeks. It's worth taking a look at.
- minkles 2y agoYeah this. It’s about getting work done. PLCs also replaced a hell of a lot of very unreliable wiring and electromechanical hardware.
- buescher 2y agoSomewhere along the way I picked up that it wasn't very long ago that a whole lot of the jobs out there for mechanical engineers were designing cam-and-gear mechanisms for timing/sequencing in industrial automation.
- dfox 2y agoThat might be case for small non-modular PLCs that replace what would otherwise be half a cabinet worth of relay rat's nest. That is a valid use for PLCs and the ladder diagram is also somewhat natural for that. But in many cases you have large-ish systems that have various lookup tables in PLC memory, do non-cyclical communication (ie. communicate with something external over some “normal” protocol, not over fieldbus) or even just contain many instances of the same logic (there are PLC families that cannot do indirect accesses to the process image memory, so if you want the PLC to do 12 instances of the same trivial logic, there is no way to do that in a loop and you have to copy-paste that 12 times…). In my opinion for many of these situations just programming the thing in “real” programming language (even while preserving the cyclic process image model) would be very beneficial.
- airbreather 2y agoYou don't understand industrial controls and the reason for scanned languages rather than event driven logic. There is a certain amount of pain and inconvenience incurred for a highly deterministic outcome that is otherwise unachievable without very significant expertise.
- CameronBanga 2y agoUnfortunately, there really isn't. Phoenix Contact has their PLCNext which is alright. But regardless of the PLC you work with, the developer experience is pretty bad compared to what anyone here is going to be familiar with.
- weaksauce 2y agostructured text is about the best thing you are going to get in the plc world. it's kinda bad and has a ton of quirks but it's alright. ladder logic is painful but works pretty reliably and probably the easiest to learn. depends on what you want to do and what you're familiar with. in all PLC is a different programming paradigm than you are used to. the simplest and cheapest way to get into it is probably automation direct stuff or maybe the arduino pro stuff.
- airbreather 2y agoAlmost all of them will import xml and you can build your own tools around this if you care so much.
- DannyBee 2y agoWhat IDE? Honestly, CodeSys is not that bad, nor is TwinCAT. TIA portal makes me want to kill myself sometimes, but Siemens AX is now just vscode with extensions! I assume you don't think 61131-3 ladder/FBD/etc is horrible, only ST? If so, it's just pascal and not C/Algol. Otherwise seems totally reasonable?
- airbreather 2y agoActually a big reason is that there is a ready pool of labour to come and modify it when you need, not just the guy who originally designed and coded it.
- minkles 2y agoYou can buy a shitty clone PLC off aliexpress if you want to do that. They are similarly priced to the arduino and the hardware interface is several orders of magnitude more robust.
- MisterTea 2y agoUnder $100 and software is free: https://www.automationdirect.com/adc/shopping/catalog/programmable_controllers/click_plcs_(stackable_micro_brick)/plc_units/c0-00dd2-d https://www.automationdirect.com/adc/shopping/catalog/progra... With Ethernet that supports both Modbus TCP and Ethernet/IP, two very standard industrial protocols*: https://www.automationdirect.com/adc/shopping/catalog/programmable_controllers/click_plcs_(stackable_micro_brick)/plc_units/c0-10dd1e-d https://www.automationdirect.com/adc/shopping/catalog/progra... Note: I *HATE* EIP but we're stuck with it in the USA.*
- rpcope1 2y agoLike a lot of Arduino products, it must be targeted at people who don't know any better and whose sole exposure to electrical engineering or systems engineering is what they see in make videos. Automation direct PLCs are cheaper than whatever they're hawking here and almost certainly way more robust (having used a few, they were surprisingly good). Anyone who is using PLCs in a remotely serious industrial fashion is almost certainly going to keep buying Rockwell or Siemens anyways.
- LtWorf 2y ago> Automation direct PLCs are cheaper Uh... no.
- MisterTea 2y agoClick is competitively priced with the Opta and programming software is free.
- erik_seaberg 2y agoThere may be competing products, but you can't go to a screwdriver shop today and buy quantity=1 to learn from, which vendors should have accommodated even at some substantial margin.
- folmar 2y agoAny large supplier will hapilly sell you one PLC of any type (there are also quite a lot projects needing just one piece of specific PLU), the tools might kill your budget though. And there are special beginner/low scale series like Siemens LOGO with simplified configuration and cheaper simpler tooling.
- erik_seaberg 2y agohttps://mall.industry.siemens.com/mall/en/WW/Catalog/Products/5000562 https://mall.industry.siemens.com/mall/en/WW/Catalog/Product... seems like a difficult vendor, with no buy button and no price tag.
- LeifCarrotson 2y agoIt's all about the education market - whether in schools or for maintenance techs and electricians to educate themselves and get promotions to controls engineering positions. No one in their right mind is using this as a product around which to build a machine or a business.
- joezydeco 2y agoI met with Arduino the other month. They're trying to get into the industrial market with a line of "pro" turnkey hardware, using their software ecosystem on top. https://store-usa.arduino.cc/collections/pro-family https://store-usa.arduino.cc/collections/pro-family
- obscuretone 2y agoPrototypes. Have 100% used arduino to PoC industrial electronics in a startup setting.
- MisterTea 2y agoSerious question: Why not use a low cost PLC?
- buescher 2y agoI'm not the GP but my guess is "if all I have is a hammer" - i.e. the same reasons you might prototype something with Arduino that you would make permanent with a timer relay. Why not prototype with a timer relay ffs? Well, because you don't have a timer relay, you do have an Arduino, and you want to make "progress" today.
- DannyBee 2y agoWhy? Even siemens (pretty high priced) sells a $200 PLC you can use. About the only people who seem impossible to get anything reasonably priced from are Allen Bradley, who even have usb->rs485 converters they sell for $1400.
- obscuretone 2y agothat's $200 that could have paid the internet bill that was cut off for being three months behind.
- DannyBee 2y agoUh? If you are in that state, i hope you are not buying any PLCs?
- elcritch 2y agoAnd probably requires some crappy Windows only IDE to work with their proprietary language. It’s probably not possible use revision control or share the system with others. Try getting data out of their system into a software system reliably.
- minkles 2y agoYeah this. It actually scares the shit out of me when I see stuff like this because I know someone naive will use one somewhere completely inappropriate and something bad will happen. (Ex EE for ref)
- airbreather 2y agoYou mean someone working outside of their recognised competencies in a dangerous field. Don't do stuff you don't understand. I'm certified in Ex design and Functional Safety and see amateur hour most days.
- eternityforest 2y agoI think we need something in between PLCs and Arduinos, but anything like that is very rare. Like, just put some 220 ohm resistors, PCB spark gaps, and ESD diodes on every pin, and you've covered a lot already. I'm planning on ordering some PCBs for something similar in a few days, and I'm still confused about why this doesn't exist already. So many simple cheap things could be done to make Arduino better. Like, connecting individual pins is fun very briefly as a beginner, after that I want nice clean professional r/cableporn. Give us 3 pin servo plugs or STEMMA connectors for everything. Put a diode on the USB-C line so I can power it externally without back feeding and breaking the spec. Maybe figure out your inrush current so I can have some peace of mind that it won't break itself with inductive current spikes. Maybe stop using crappy blue relays. 99% of DIY projects do not switch 120vac. Why can't we have protected MOSFETs that don't wear out? Can we quit using a different pinout for ever everything? Just make your module copy something similar. Every little I2C display thingy has a different pinout for no reason, seemingly evenly distributed across all the possible combinations. Give us a 5v IO pin for addressable LEDs. Why am I still using discreet 5mm LEDs with dead bug soldered on resistors for space-constrained stuff? Hobby type MCU boards are too deep in the "Hacker" mindset, where the tech is the focus, as opposed to being part of something else. Adafruit does great stuff, but so many boards are just... Meh. Anything you build without getting a custom PCB almost always winds up as cable spaghetti even for trivial things, and it doesn't need to be like that.
- petsfed 2y agoI think its because the difference between "hacked together on top of an Arduino" and "hacked together on top of an Arduino with ESD protection and connectors" is basically nill. The market for that in-between species has got to be an order of magnitude smaller than either, because the problem becomes the one-size-fits-all approach. I hate how many screw terminals appear in the average PLC wiring scheme, but there's really no other way to get things as customizable as the customer wants without servicing a million and a half SKUs. It sucks, but that's the business.
- eternityforest 2y agoThere's a lot that can be done if you don't need voltages above 5v or more than a few amps though, as long as you don't need the full flexibility of the MCU. If you make all the IO pins accessible, you'll never protect them all fully or have any room for dedicated special purpose connectors, but if you choose the most common features and only support those you can do a lot. For the board I'm doing I only have 3x servo plugs or STEMMA connectors, plus an LED strip output, switched 5v output, and Qwiic/Stemma QT plug, plus headers for the most common class D amp and RS485 modules. That covers about half of all Arduino stuff I've ever done, and leaves a ton of room for onboard features even on a 35x70mm board.
- deburo 2y agoAh, I thought it was something new, perhaps offering a IDE built on modern tech. It looks like it's built on old Win32 common controls, surely with poor text editing features. I wonder who's going to be the first to integrate something like VSCode in their dev environment. The dev tools in the industrial automation industry are so depressing, luckily we have the excellent Ignition (from Inductive Automation) for HMI/SCADA development.
- gaze 2y agoModern tech like electron? Qt might have been nice but win32 is snappy and dependable.
- fragmede 2y agoA number of places have VSCode extenstions for their dev environment, eg ExpressIF for Esp32.
- stefcoetzee 2y agoSIMATIC AX seems to be a step in the direction of VSCode integration.
- deburo 2y agoOh this is interesting. Tia Portal v19 has this clunky capability in which you can export, edit, reimport all scripts of a project via a vscode extension that communicates with the Tia Portal process. All that effort just to have better autocompletion, but the export/import loop feels inefficient & some scripts just can’t be exported.
- airbreather 2y agoJust about all PLCs have had export import for decades, more recently via xml.
- Gracana 2y agoI gave this a shot a while back and it's as clunky as it looks in the screenshots, so about the same as the established industry.
- deadlyllama 2y agoHow prevalent is ladder logic for new industrial systems? Over two decades ago I was programming a Foxboro PLC in their SALL language, which was compiled down to C. Variables and control structures! And you could hack the C if you wanted your state transitions to go faster.
- applied_heat 2y agoFor Boolean logic ladder is still a good visual representation that can be animated to make it obvious which inputs are determining the output. In Allen Bradley rslogix it can be entered quickly using the keyboard. In my opinion the ladder paradigm is poor when dealing with numeric values, and function block better serves the purpose there
- folmar 2y agoIt's sadly bread and butter, if you order a typical PLC program made-to-measure you'll get ladders. Anyway custom languages are certainly not the way to go, IEC 61131-3 languages are virtually always used, LD being most popular and SFC also gets its share.
- synecdoche 2y agoIn my opinion Ladder logic is easiest to troubleshoot, as cause and effect can be easily followed, especially when being connected online and seeing the signaling. Unless events are too quick. Then no language has the advantage. Then data trace is helpful. Structured Text is superior when it comes to calculations, bit manipulation and code flow (loops, conditionals etc). Sequences diagrams are advantageous for abstracting sequences. Function Block Diagrams are good for connecting abstractions. They all have their place imo, except Instruction List, which I can’t think of having a single advantage.
- acureau 2y agoI work for a subsidiary of a large industrial equipment manufacturing company, ladder logic is ubiquitous. At least across our partners and the plants we operate within. It's usually written by former electricians called "controls engineers", not software engineers, because it mimics relay diagrams. Controls engineers tend to live completely within the software ecosystem. I've known few who were comfortable with even "structured text" routines. One of the major advantages my company has is that they hire software engineers to produce custom featured HMIs for customers, and train on ladder logic.
- kristerj 2y agoIt kinda seems like we've taken the best part of arduino (programming environment) and replaced it with the worst part of PLCs (IEC 61131). In turn we have traded the reliability of PLC hardware and compatibility with industrial sensors with hardware that has none of that. We have actually been getting away from proprietary PLC's just so we can get away from IEC 61131. Its taken a few years but we are about there.
- heyflyguy 2y agoLadder logic? Ugh, come on!
- snvzz 2y agoDamn. I was expecting ladder for everyone. I am nostalgic for ladder, which I learned alongside basic in the late 80s, and haven't used since. I'd run PC-LDR on a PC emulator (transformer) on the Amiga 500. But it's walled behind a license fee. So no ladder for everyone, but rather, ladder for people who are already using ladder and aren't gonna drop their PLCs to adopt Arduino. Sad.
- ohthatsnotright 2y agoAutonomy may have some software you'd want to check out https://autonomylogic.com/ https://autonomylogic.com/
- snvzz 2y agoThis is awesome. And further reinforces the "what the hell is Arduino doing" feeling.