Lightning said...
Do you think there will ever be a day, when one copy of software will program all brands ??? How about a standard lead ??
Well... one should "Never say Never".
The name of the game is "profit". No company wants to give away their "bread & butter" incomes.
To keep their hold on their part of the PLC market share, they provide proprietary interfacing. It doesn't matter if they provide a good interface or not. They are hoping that the consumers are Brand-Loyal, regardless of the quality of the interface.
Some, being Brand-Loyal, will accept anything that comes from that brand producer. Whether the latest widget is good or bad, they, the Brand-Loyal consumers, learn how to deal with it. That's just the way it is, and the brand-producers love it! And they charge accordingly!
Of course, the interesting part is, no matter what interface (brand) you are using, all of the interfaces are talking to the same CPU.
Before anyone blows a cork, when I say "same CPU", what I mean is, IN GENERAL, all of the CPU's, whatever kind, follow the same set of Primitive Instructions. There certainly are some exceptions (RISC,...).
The point is, if you can accept the idea that, in general, all of the CPU's are the same, then ALL OF THE VARIOUS INTERFACES ARE ARBITRARY.
That is, regardless of the hoops you have to jump through to make your particular interface work for you, they all, ultimately, say the same thing to the CPU.
So... if you can accept those ideas then you might think that the general solution is to simply build your own interface!
Easier said than done.
In addition to that, just to prevent that kind of thing from happening, the various producers design their CPU Modules with various hardware differences. In much the same way that your key will not work in my lock, nor will my key work in your lock.
If your lock is on a door leading to Room-X and my lock is on another door leading to Room-X, well... don't you see that we are trying to get to the same place but have to use different means. The key-type is dependent upon the lock-type.
Of course, what you are looking for is a "pass-key". That could work if all of the locks are the same brand - maybe!
The same can be said about the cabling issue. Keeping things unique, proprietary and secret, helps to secure the producers profit! I really can't blame them for that... can you?
As users, we would all love to have a single general purpose Programming Interface and a single standardized cable. It ain't gonna happen soon (I can't say "Never").
The only way I see it happening is if someone comes out with a general purpose PLC, having an open architecture and a user-defined interface. (There are, in fact, people working on this at this very moment!)
The phrase "general purpose" is not meant to imply a certain limitation in capability. Rather, it is meant to imply general access to all capabilities of the CPU.
As long as there is "Brand-Loyalty" (blind or otherwise), I don't see your wish coming true in the near future.
