I deal with both PIs and PLCs for a living. I don’t have much faith in the future of PLCs to be honest. They just don’t seem to be willing to move forward in any sense of the word. The price for the same hardware tracks inflation, the lead times are getting worse, no version control, no higher level code development, still struggling over basic driver stuff, almost no interoperability, basic things that are wrong aren’t getting fixed, almost no code sharing, everything locked down…
Basically they fit 1994 and decided to just stay there. The only good stuff they offer is greater reliability and more I/O. Right now I can buy an HMI-PI-PLC that can do everything my old systems can do and more for lower cost.
As far as guys I know that do industrial MMI, it’s PLCs all the way down for reliability. They’d desperately like to avoid the Siemens and ABs of the industry, but nobody ever got fired for buying those and they cratered. Which they do, no doubt, but I wouldn’t be trusting much to a hobbyist SBC.
Basically your argument is of the form: IBM is the best and there is no future in the desktop. No one is going to want to have to buy software from multiple vendors. They want the same guys who made the hardware, to make the OS, and to make the software.
You have no idea how frustrating it is to deal with companies like Rockwell and Siemens. From endless tech support licenses, to special cables, to refusing to support any new features, to lockdown down protocols. I can share my python code with anyone, not my compactlogix code. Every single sin of the tech industry you can name these guy implement.
Eventually they will lose. Eventually the PLC will either become like every other embedded dev platform or get replaced by ones that are.
Also, fuck having to deal with stl and ladder logic, if the industry minded towards more common languages and frameworks, you wouldn’t need to have mechanical engineers learning plc programming, you could have actual developers working on it.
Every second that I had to spend on software like tia portal drove me further and further away from industrial automation
I had to get a CRC done in ladder once and this is my goto (hehe) war story.
Be easier to teach the mech-es I work with python. “Ok I setup some free software on your computer. Go find some tutorials online and follow it. Let me know if you get stuck” vs "alright I offered one of my children to our Rockwell Sales rep who is cough…working…cough from home. He has agree to give us a 30 day license as part of our Faustian bargain. I talked to IT and we think we can get it on the license manager sometime this week. Did you setup an account on the Rockwell site so you can read tutorials? No? Ok get on that. It has surprisingly complex password rules and requires the account manager to setup your account.
When that is done I will build you a 2 or 3 thousand dollar test system so you can test code. No there is no simulator you should trust you need physical hardware. Did you install the Studio 5000 software? Shit you installed the old version. Rslinx is broken now. Fuck fuck. Ok I can fix this, we just need to delete the old Rslinx and make sure the registry is clear. After a day or so…
Ok so download Studio 5000 from Rockwell, make sure you get firmware release 33. Yes they have updated firmwslare 33 times. That should make you very confident. Now I want you to follow good coding practices as you learn. Unfortunately since no one is legally allowed to share code and even if it was legal it would be near impossible good coding practices are defined by whomever old timer teaches you. Which is me, hi. What you don’t want to learn from one flawed imperfect person you want to have an entire community sharing, growing, creating together? Hehe stop you are killing me.
Oh you are getting a weird error code? Go tell Rockwell. You can’t email them. You have to call them. Use the direct dial numbers and you might reach someone within the hour who might know how to fix it. Or you can bother me and I will check my to see if my dead tree notebook has the answer."
You people think I am exaggerating, I really am not. I am understating how truly messed up it is. I do not know any controls engineer who are fully sane and not addicted rageaholics.
It’s actually making me mad how close this was to my onboarding experience when I first started working with PLCs.
The test setup especially. Having to create this complex pseudo machine in order to make a preliminary proof of concept, only to find my IO block poached off my desk the next morning because someone else needed one.
That’s rough. For my interns I try to shield them from most of it, start with some real basics like uploading and downloading, changing constants, cross-references etc.
Did they go to shit or were they always shit? They’ve never been able to code software worth a damned and I don’t know if there’s any combination of model + IOS version that’s fully compatible with any other, they changed the syntax of commands pretty much every chance they got back in '05 and everything I’ve seen suggests they’ve not changed at all in that
And here I bitch about the bullshit UI/UX devs are doing to every piece of software I use (the usual office and file management stuff, on Windows, Linux and Android).
That’s just insane. The stuff that specialized industries do to protect their profits sometimes is really effing galling. I’ve seen somewhat similar illogic in security and surveillance hardware. Wait, you designed it to work on a network, but you left the ethernet port off, it has to be physically added to each device? And if a device ever fails over to another path (another network port, serial, telephone, cell card) it will never retry the primary connection until we signal it too, and maybe have to go put hands on it? You know it’s the 21st century, right?
I deal with both PIs and PLCs for a living. I don’t have much faith in the future of PLCs to be honest. They just don’t seem to be willing to move forward in any sense of the word. The price for the same hardware tracks inflation, the lead times are getting worse, no version control, no higher level code development, still struggling over basic driver stuff, almost no interoperability, basic things that are wrong aren’t getting fixed, almost no code sharing, everything locked down…
Basically they fit 1994 and decided to just stay there. The only good stuff they offer is greater reliability and more I/O. Right now I can buy an HMI-PI-PLC that can do everything my old systems can do and more for lower cost.
As far as guys I know that do industrial MMI, it’s PLCs all the way down for reliability. They’d desperately like to avoid the Siemens and ABs of the industry, but nobody ever got fired for buying those and they cratered. Which they do, no doubt, but I wouldn’t be trusting much to a hobbyist SBC.
Basically your argument is of the form: IBM is the best and there is no future in the desktop. No one is going to want to have to buy software from multiple vendors. They want the same guys who made the hardware, to make the OS, and to make the software.
You have no idea how frustrating it is to deal with companies like Rockwell and Siemens. From endless tech support licenses, to special cables, to refusing to support any new features, to lockdown down protocols. I can share my python code with anyone, not my compactlogix code. Every single sin of the tech industry you can name these guy implement.
Eventually they will lose. Eventually the PLC will either become like every other embedded dev platform or get replaced by ones that are.
Also, fuck having to deal with stl and ladder logic, if the industry minded towards more common languages and frameworks, you wouldn’t need to have mechanical engineers learning plc programming, you could have actual developers working on it.
Every second that I had to spend on software like tia portal drove me further and further away from industrial automation
I had to get a CRC done in ladder once and this is my goto (hehe) war story.
Be easier to teach the mech-es I work with python. “Ok I setup some free software on your computer. Go find some tutorials online and follow it. Let me know if you get stuck” vs "alright I offered one of my children to our Rockwell Sales rep who is cough…working…cough from home. He has agree to give us a 30 day license as part of our Faustian bargain. I talked to IT and we think we can get it on the license manager sometime this week. Did you setup an account on the Rockwell site so you can read tutorials? No? Ok get on that. It has surprisingly complex password rules and requires the account manager to setup your account.
When that is done I will build you a 2 or 3 thousand dollar test system so you can test code. No there is no simulator you should trust you need physical hardware. Did you install the Studio 5000 software? Shit you installed the old version. Rslinx is broken now. Fuck fuck. Ok I can fix this, we just need to delete the old Rslinx and make sure the registry is clear. After a day or so…
Ok so download Studio 5000 from Rockwell, make sure you get firmware release 33. Yes they have updated firmwslare 33 times. That should make you very confident. Now I want you to follow good coding practices as you learn. Unfortunately since no one is legally allowed to share code and even if it was legal it would be near impossible good coding practices are defined by whomever old timer teaches you. Which is me, hi. What you don’t want to learn from one flawed imperfect person you want to have an entire community sharing, growing, creating together? Hehe stop you are killing me.
Oh you are getting a weird error code? Go tell Rockwell. You can’t email them. You have to call them. Use the direct dial numbers and you might reach someone within the hour who might know how to fix it. Or you can bother me and I will check my to see if my dead tree notebook has the answer."
You people think I am exaggerating, I really am not. I am understating how truly messed up it is. I do not know any controls engineer who are fully sane and not addicted rageaholics.
It’s actually making me mad how close this was to my onboarding experience when I first started working with PLCs.
The test setup especially. Having to create this complex pseudo machine in order to make a preliminary proof of concept, only to find my IO block poached off my desk the next morning because someone else needed one.
That’s rough. For my interns I try to shield them from most of it, start with some real basics like uploading and downloading, changing constants, cross-references etc.
On the bright side I will be employed for life.
Dang, that makes Cisco look competent and approachable by comparison
And that’s saying something. Another company that went to shit when they became a quasi-monopoly.
Did they go to shit or were they always shit? They’ve never been able to code software worth a damned and I don’t know if there’s any combination of model + IOS version that’s fully compatible with any other, they changed the syntax of commands pretty much every chance they got back in '05 and everything I’ve seen suggests they’ve not changed at all in that
W. T. FUCK.
And here I bitch about the bullshit UI/UX devs are doing to every piece of software I use (the usual office and file management stuff, on Windows, Linux and Android).
That’s just insane. The stuff that specialized industries do to protect their profits sometimes is really effing galling. I’ve seen somewhat similar illogic in security and surveillance hardware. Wait, you designed it to work on a network, but you left the ethernet port off, it has to be physically added to each device? And if a device ever fails over to another path (another network port, serial, telephone, cell card) it will never retry the primary connection until we signal it too, and maybe have to go put hands on it? You know it’s the 21st century, right?