VB, .NET, etc.. type of question

Ok ladies and gents. I would like to throw something out here and see what information and ideas come back.

I am working on a vision system, currently because we like to repurpose things, i am using an older TSX07 PLC.

Has anyone here written code to talk to this PLC using any avail language?

I ask this because i am attempting to write a program for the users on the floor and dont need the users on the floor to have complete control over the vision system. At the same time i am using the PLC for some control over the machine center. I would like to be able to access the Inputs and outputs of the PLC and use those in my program. Program to run on PC. However not sure if things would be fast enough.

So the next part of the question would be if you were successfull in writing such a code, what would you say of its speed?

I will need something to be able to handle approx 4 cycles per sec.

Now here is where the questioning gets more in depth. I am thinking that speed wise this whole way of doing it will be to slow. So what other options do i have for getting the inputs and outputs of some device controllable by a PC?

Hope that is clear. Would like to see how others have handled such things.

Thanks and have a great day.

The speed of reading the PLCs IO with a PC is only part of the equation. A bigger concern would be the determinism. For example, let say you can poll the IO with the PC at a rate of 50ms. Every once in a while that PC is going to decide to do some other task and suddenly your 50ms can become 500ms. Now imagine you are watching a prox switch to look for a part passing by. If that part does not stay on the switch for at least 500ms, then you have a chance of randomly missing the switch.

As for your TSX07, it looks like it supports the Modbus protocol, so you have the option of sending Modbus requests to it or using a Modbus driver. AdvancedHMI does have ModbusRTU and ModbusTCP drivers which can help you get started very quickly with read the IO from the PLC.