PLC logic generation software

Tim, the point is to use a simple method of having a non-programmer program a sequence without HMIs and a PC etc...

We maintain a lot of older all hardwired equipment with old obsolete timers, counters drums etc..and this would allow the tech to reto-fit a small PLC, (without me going through the trouble of programming it), to quickly turn around a shutdown situation...maybe....

Right now it's rather slow to react because I'm using a lookup table and it may take 2000+ scans to find the input image and then find the corresponding output image.
 
Going back to the original topic of the thread I did once see a hand-built VB application which someone from another company had written to write code for him.

He had taken a very OOP approach to his design and working in the water industry he had plenty of objects to work with: valves, pumps, motors, filters, entire filter beds, even 'soft' objects like sequences etc. The output from his VB application was a source file for Siemens STEP7. The user input was a definition of the number and relationship of objects and the I/O mapping where appropriate. He had coded in his VB the logical behaviour of each object, so wherever he called for a Valve Type 01 the same source code would used throughout according to his design. He used an Excel spreadsheet for his tag and I/O management and the VB app simply read from that. It was most impressive in operation. He was convinced that for his company's needs it cut the software engineering cost of any projects they were bidding by about 80%. Commissioning and debugging was easy too since so much was standard tested proven code.

However it was a very specific application and even the author admitted it was far from being a general-purpose code writer. What he had done was to invest a vast amount of time up front in doing accurate design and coding in his VB app, and then made it re-usable for him in his industry. Most people may not have the luxury of the initial time or repeatability of applications.

Regards

Ken
 
The part of ProDef which showed a great deal of promise wasn't the code generation but the automatic generation of documentation based on the process model. Perhaps you could do something similar with Controldraw? Anyway, Invensys have now taken over the rights to ProDef so it's probably completely dead now!
 
"Perhaps you could do something similar with Controldraw?"


Code generation has never been an objective with ControlDraw. Instead the intention is to provide a tool that you can use to specify and design the application in as much detail as you wish, and provide documentation for users and programmers to use.
Francis
 
FrancisL said:
ProDef was an example of a PLC code generator, it failed see
http://www.control.com/1026217209/index_html
There are others, notably ISAGraf and Codesys.

CoDeSys is alive and well in the programming systems of many different controls vendors. Their software doesn't generate ladder or SFC higher level languages but it does take higher level languages and generate processor (target) specific code.
 
ushidayo said:
The part of ProDef which showed a great deal of promise wasn't the code generation but the automatic generation of documentation based on the process model. Perhaps you could do something similar with Controldraw? Anyway, Invensys have now taken over the rights to ProDef so it's probably completely dead now!
aRgGGHH. I remember ProDev from my Invensys days. I don't think Invensys ever "took over" ProDev but just invested quite a lot of $ into the thing.

Looking back in 20/20 hindsight, the concept would never survive.

- No ONLINE EDITING

- Difficult to learn (for me). Which was the entire idea of not dealing with ladder logic in the 1st place.

- PLC technology (software and hardware) change rapidly, the time one spending updating ProDev negate any benefits.

- Support!!!! The code it generate is hard to troubleshoot for the lucky plant who got the end product. Not to mention it bloated like nothing you ever seen before. Once a code is modified one can no longer go back to Prodev and work on the source code.



It's one of those thing that looks great in concept but bombed in reality.
 
FrancisL said:
"Perhaps you could do something similar with Controldraw?"


Code generation has never been an objective with ControlDraw. Instead the intention is to provide a tool that you can use to specify and design the application in as much detail as you wish, and provide documentation for users and programmers to use.
Francis

I didn't mean code generation, I meant automatic generation of documentation. Prodef had the ability to store standard documentation for the classes the user made, and then generate complete documents for every instance of the classes within the project. This documentation data was stored in XML format. The ability to have textual documentation of a process design as well a graphical model has some real benefits. What I mean is this, the reader will most probably have already mastered the syntax of written documentation. Whereas a graphical model requires the reader to learn a new syntax and set of symbols. I realize that a good graphical model can be less open to interpretation than a purely text based specification, but this doesn't mean that a written document should be totally discarded.
 
harryting said:
aRgGGHH. I remember ProDev from my Invensys days. I don't think Invensys ever "took over" ProDev but just invested quite a lot of $ into the thing.

Looking back in 20/20 hindsight, the concept would never survive.

- No ONLINE EDITING

- Difficult to learn (for me). Which was the entire idea of not dealing with ladder logic in the 1st place.

- PLC technology (software and hardware) change rapidly, the time one spending updating ProDev negate any benefits.

- Support!!!! The code it generate is hard to troubleshoot for the lucky plant who got the end product. Not to mention it bloated like nothing you ever seen before. Once a code is modified one can no longer go back to Prodev and work on the source code.



It's one of those thing that looks great in concept but bombed in reality.

What is ProDev?
 

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