Hello all,
I'm curious of your opinions and experience regarding common industry practice. I am a mech eng with some very basic automation knowledge, and will be taking over beginning and intermediate automation and plc programming courses at the technical school I work for, as the previous instructor left to return to industry. Since most of our equipment is Siemens equipment, i had a one-on-one 3 day training session with a trainer for a local consulting company that specializes in Trainings world-wide for Siemens equipment. We covered what he considered to be the necessary fundamentals for beginning and intermediate courses intensively. In discussing with him certain industry trends and the best way to approach the courses in this regard, he gave me a significantly different perspective than the prior instructor, which led me to ask the experts on this board for your opinions.
Under the previous instructor, the students programmed solely with an older version (5.4) of the step 7 software. Almost all programming done by our students on the mechatronics learning systems (Festo, Amatrol) we have was done in STL. The instructor had worked in industry prior to teaching, between 2001 and 2005 programming mostly automotive assembly lines for Daimler, BMW, Audi and Volkswagen. He claimed most German industry programming was done in STL.
In my 3 day training, we worked almost solely with Tia portal sp2. While the trainer called the Software buggy and said it really should be considered a beta version, even with the latest updates, there were many elements that he pointed out were definite improvements to the older versions. In his opinion, as the students won't be out in industry for another couple years, it makes Sense to focus on the newer software as Siemens will eventually no longer support the older versions of step7. He said, however, that a short intro to the older software may not be a bad idea.
The second thing that I found interesting, was the use of programming languages. As a trainer that does 70% industry trainings and 30% instructor trainings, his opinion was that the vast majority of European industry programs are written in Function Block Diagram so that maintenance can troubleshoot. STL he said is mostly reserved for programming of math calculations, not much more than that. He said programming large systems in STL usually results in maintanence ultimately cursing out the programmer and is overly complicated. For sequential systems with more than 10 steps, he said that s7-graph is excellent for this, using FBD becomes a bit unwieldy and it's easy to start losing the overall view of the program. He also praised SCL a bit for certain applications, but we didnt go into this as time was too short. He said that programming the entire learning systems that we have in STL was somewhat ridiculous and not quite indicative of most industries, and some prior students under the old instructor also said that troubleshooting long programs written in STL was sometimes a disaster.
I'm curious what you guys think about this. I know most of the native English speaking colleages on this board probably mostly program in Ladder, and this is what I learned first and is most intuitive to me, but where I am working this isnt really an option, since we dont use LAD.
So what'cha think?
I'm curious of your opinions and experience regarding common industry practice. I am a mech eng with some very basic automation knowledge, and will be taking over beginning and intermediate automation and plc programming courses at the technical school I work for, as the previous instructor left to return to industry. Since most of our equipment is Siemens equipment, i had a one-on-one 3 day training session with a trainer for a local consulting company that specializes in Trainings world-wide for Siemens equipment. We covered what he considered to be the necessary fundamentals for beginning and intermediate courses intensively. In discussing with him certain industry trends and the best way to approach the courses in this regard, he gave me a significantly different perspective than the prior instructor, which led me to ask the experts on this board for your opinions.
Under the previous instructor, the students programmed solely with an older version (5.4) of the step 7 software. Almost all programming done by our students on the mechatronics learning systems (Festo, Amatrol) we have was done in STL. The instructor had worked in industry prior to teaching, between 2001 and 2005 programming mostly automotive assembly lines for Daimler, BMW, Audi and Volkswagen. He claimed most German industry programming was done in STL.
In my 3 day training, we worked almost solely with Tia portal sp2. While the trainer called the Software buggy and said it really should be considered a beta version, even with the latest updates, there were many elements that he pointed out were definite improvements to the older versions. In his opinion, as the students won't be out in industry for another couple years, it makes Sense to focus on the newer software as Siemens will eventually no longer support the older versions of step7. He said, however, that a short intro to the older software may not be a bad idea.
The second thing that I found interesting, was the use of programming languages. As a trainer that does 70% industry trainings and 30% instructor trainings, his opinion was that the vast majority of European industry programs are written in Function Block Diagram so that maintenance can troubleshoot. STL he said is mostly reserved for programming of math calculations, not much more than that. He said programming large systems in STL usually results in maintanence ultimately cursing out the programmer and is overly complicated. For sequential systems with more than 10 steps, he said that s7-graph is excellent for this, using FBD becomes a bit unwieldy and it's easy to start losing the overall view of the program. He also praised SCL a bit for certain applications, but we didnt go into this as time was too short. He said that programming the entire learning systems that we have in STL was somewhat ridiculous and not quite indicative of most industries, and some prior students under the old instructor also said that troubleshooting long programs written in STL was sometimes a disaster.
I'm curious what you guys think about this. I know most of the native English speaking colleages on this board probably mostly program in Ladder, and this is what I learned first and is most intuitive to me, but where I am working this isnt really an option, since we dont use LAD.
So what'cha think?