Greetings Dan ...
perhaps you misunderstood my point ... if so, I apologize for not being more clear ...
what I meant was that I personally have a problem with instructors who do nothing other than make an assignment – and then "see how long it takes the student to figure it out on his own" ...
in my book, this is like a little-league baseball coach who drops his team off at the ballpark for practice – and then comes back a few hours later to pick the kids up and drive them home ...
a REAL coach will watch Little Johnnie practice batting – and find out what's RIGHT and reinforce it – and find out what's WRONG and correct it ...
at this point, we really don't know anything at all about the OP's instructor – or really whether there actually IS an instructor anywhere in the picture ... what seems "interesting" to me is that: (1) here we have a student with a "PLC assignment" – (2) which has presumably been assigned by an "instructor" – and yet (3) the student claims to know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about PLCs ...
it seems like a few "getting started" rungs should have been discussed prior to the assignment ... and certainly some definitions of XIC, XIO, OTE, TON, etc. ...
personally, if I were a student thrown into this "sink or swim" situation, I would question whether or not I should be paying for this level of education ...
specifically, if I'm required to "do it all on my own" (with ZERO input from the instructor) – then WHY am I paying for the instructor in the first place? ...
then again, maybe this was intended to be a "research" type of assignment – to see how well the student can pull together his own resources ... "maybe" ... but based on what's been posted so far, it just seems that something fishy is going on here ...
personally I tend to give everyone the benefit of a doubt ... I've made my best effort at giving the OP some free friendly advice to get him started ... the advice won't "give away" the project – but it should be enough to get a truly motivated student headed in the right direction ...
party on ...