[HN Gopher] Arduino PLC IDE
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Arduino PLC IDE
Author : Lwrless
Score : 55 points
Date : 2024-09-05 15:17 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.arduino.cc)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.arduino.cc)
| LtWorf wrote:
| Haha 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Probably for folks who want to play around with PLC
| dfox wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Doesn'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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Yeah this. It's about getting work done.
|
| PLCs also replaced a hell of a lot of very unreliable
| wiring and electromechanical hardware.
| dfox wrote:
| That 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.
| Eduard wrote:
| > The 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.
|
| can you give examples where that is the case? It's hard
| for me to believe this. The embedded C ecosystem has all
| the best practices available (software and hardware
| abstractions, libraries and frameworks, unlimited open
| source availability, transparent tool chains, testing,
| build automation, continuous deployment, huge developer
| pool with shared)
|
| Does PLC match ALL this and even go beyond?
| Salgat wrote:
| At least with ladder logic, at the steel mill I worked
| at, even electricians with no programming experience
| could look at a ladder logic program and troubleshoot the
| problem, even remotely adjust controls and do overrides.
| CameronBanga wrote:
| Unfortunately, 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 wrote:
| structured 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.
| minkles wrote:
| You 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 wrote:
| Under $100 and software is free: 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.automati
| ondirect.com/adc/shopping/catalog/progra...
|
| Note: I *HATE* EIP but we're stuck with it in the USA.*
| rpcope1 wrote:
| Like 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 wrote:
| > Automation direct PLCs are cheaper
|
| Uh... no.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Click is competitively priced with the Opta and programming
| software is free.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| There 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 wrote:
| Any 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 wrote:
| https://mall.industry.siemens.com/mall/en/WW/Catalog/Prod
| uct... seems like a difficult vendor, with no buy button
| and no price tag.
| seabird wrote:
| Call your closest electrical supply and get the price.
| Plant maintenance technicians are comparatively old-
| timey, so ask yourself how you would do it in 1990 and
| try that.
|
| And for the record, brand new Logos are like $100-$200 on
| the low end and you probably shouldn't use them. The low
| end of S7-1200 will come in between $500-$1000 and is
| much more likely to fulfill your needs.
| doobiedowner wrote:
| Sure, call. Do a back and forth with calls and emails for
| two days with their sales guy to make sure they got it
| right. Spending five to six figures. 5-15% of order shows
| up incorrect.
|
| When you go to try another distributor: No, you're in
| crappy vendor's territory. So, sorry!
|
| Waiting for that invisible hand of the free market to
| step in...
| MisterTea wrote:
| > Like 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.
|
| Industrial automation is exactly this. If you look up the
| history of the PLC, Dick Morley, founder of Modicon,
| specifically designed it to hide the computer part. The
| reasons were twofold: partly for marketing as in ye olde days
| computers were big, expensive and required costly engineers,
| and to enable plant electricians and other maintenance
| personnel the ability to program them using ladder schematics
| which is why we have ladder logic. So from the beginning the
| PLC has been targeted at non-technical personnel.
|
| > 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).
|
| Indeed, though I only like the Click. I have two Clicks at
| home and used them at work for all sorts of little projects.
| I haven't bothered with their Productivity line as I dont
| think it's a very forward thinking platform as its stuck in
| the 90's with parallel busses on backplanes with proprietary
| expansion (literally a clone of their Koyo DL series). Then
| there is their legacy Direct Logic series from Koyo which is
| solid as hell but long in the tooth. Now they are selling LS
| Electric which makes me feel they are all over the place PLC
| wise.
|
| For bigger automation projects I use Beckhoff gear which is
| very modular and their EtherCAT protocol is very well
| designed and thought out - deterministic structs over
| Ethernet. My only gripe is the big shitty Visual studio shell
| IDE that tends to fall over but every automation vendor has
| big shitty IDE's. Thankfully they have a FreeBSD runtime
| alternative to Windows Embedded for the controller side. I
| can write real-time PLC programs in C/C++ and whatever on the
| Windows/BSD side. Or stick with IEC 61131-3 languages.
|
| > Anyone who is using PLCs in a remotely serious industrial
| fashion is almost certainly going to keep buying Rockwell or
| Siemens anyways.
|
| That is more of an industry trope: "no one ever got fired for
| buying IBM" but replace IBM with AB for the USA or Siemens in
| Europe. Basically, Enterprise grade automation with all the
| associated enterprise goodness: high cost, licensing, price
| gouging legacy support, and poor technical decisions. I stay
| away from it.
| fluorinerocket wrote:
| Beckhoff is so awesome. I bought at least 100 of their EP
| series modules, which are IP65 and can be mounted anywhere
| and use M12 and M8 connectors, so with the right sensors
| you can just connect with an off the shelf cable, no wiring
| connectors. No running endless sensor and actuator cables
| back to a central cabinet.
|
| And you get fast deterministic control with etherCAT no
| problem.
|
| Don't sleep on beckhoff
| petsfed wrote:
| There's also this really weird fear in that industry of
| open-source anything.
|
| A while back, I was investigating security options for PLCs
| (in the light of e.g. stuxnet), and while Siemens and
| Rockwell do ultimately feature such things, there was
| always a lot of "you can trust _our_ security schema, but
| you can 't trust that open-source stuff, anybody could put
| anything in there".
|
| There are very good reasons to use PLCs, that the Arduino
| PLCs completely fail to address. But I'll bet that a lot of
| criticism within the industry will come down to "its open
| source, so you can't trust them!".
| willglynn wrote:
| Seconding Beckhoff. EtherCAT is a fantastic protocol,
| TwinCAT/BSD works great, reliability is excellent. It's
| super nice to run realtime PLC code on specific processor
| cores with us of jitter while other cores run a normal OS
| with normal applications (e.g. VictoriaMetrics) on the
| controller itself.
|
| I have a construction project involving several buildings
| with overlapping infrastructure. Everything gets connected
| to EtherCAT as quickly as possible. Electric generation:
| solar panels, batteries, inverters. Energy management:
| branch circuit monitoring, weather forecasts, solar
| forecasts, load control for things like EV charging and
| water heating. HVAC: heat pumps, buffer tanks, circulation
| pumps, valves. Building automation: lighting, access
| control. I just add I/O wherever, connect over Ethernet,
| and glue all the signals together in software.
|
| I wouldn't dare approach a project like this with Arduino.
| doobiedowner wrote:
| How is procurement process with Beckhoff? I am tempted to
| make the jump from mostly AB.
| willglynn wrote:
| It's... fine? Unlike certain other brands, I've
| encountered no network of frothing, territorial,
| gatekeeping dealers with Beckhoff. For my project, I
| reached out to sales.usa@beckhoff.com, got a rep, asked
| for a quote, and went from there.
|
| Secondhand can be viable too. Some of my "jellybean"
| EtherCAT terminals came from eBay. I won't get help from
| Beckhoff if they break, but given that I already have
| replacements on hand, I'm really not worried about it.
|
| Beckhoff also lets you download almost all the
| development tools, runtimes, and PLC libraries without
| paying. In their words:
|
| > Trial licenses can be generated in the TwinCAT 3
| development environment (XAE) for many TwinCAT 3
| functions for a validity period of 7 days. This can be
| repeated any number of times. An internet connection is
| not required for this. In this way, these TwinCAT
| functions can be used simply and cost-effectively in
| laboratory operations, e.g. in the education sector.
|
| This is obviously useful for development and
| experimentation. It can also be an escape hatch in
| production if you need to substitute controllers.
| Beckhoff wants you to pay for what you use, sure, but
| their licensing scheme goes out of its way to avoid
| kicking you when you're down.
| nick__m wrote:
| I second your opinion on Automation Direct PLC. I use a few
| of them in an installation for a museum 15 years ago and they
| had a surprisingly good reliability/feature/price ratio.
| doobiedowner wrote:
| Cheap and reliable goods. Free software. Great prices.
| Decent Docs.
|
| Best of all, no middle men distributors to dick around
| with. It is so easy to buy their stuff compared to almost
| all other controls hardware.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| I 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
| obscuretone wrote:
| Prototypes.
|
| Have 100% used arduino to PoC industrial electronics in a
| startup setting.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Serious question: Why not use a low cost PLC?
| minkles wrote:
| Yeah 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)
| eternityforest wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| deburo wrote:
| Ah, 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 wrote:
| Modern tech like electron? Qt might have been nice but win32 is
| snappy and dependable.
| fragmede wrote:
| A number of places have VSCode extenstions for their dev
| environment, eg ExpressIF for Esp32.
| stefcoetzee wrote:
| SIMATIC AX seems to be a step in the direction of VSCode
| integration.
| Gracana wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| How 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 wrote:
| For 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 wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| In 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.
| kristerj wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| Ladder logic? Ugh, come on!
| snvzz wrote:
| Damn. 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.
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