Please be gentle

Two points;
First, yes, the Rabbit’s aren’t bad, but they are a perfect example of why a common, more expensive solution is better than a cheaper less expensive solution. The Rabbit processors don’t take common code libraries making it very time consuming and thus expensive to integrate them into industrial products. I used to work for a company that used a Rabbit processor for an I/O product and we wanted to make it “Produce/Consume” compatible. We contracted with a company that sold the ability to do that but, in the end, even their solution would have been three to four times as expensive as normal because it was a Rabbit processor. Again, the Rabbit processor works great but code development can be a pain if you want to do something outside of the normal for what they offer.
Seconds, I volunteer for a local fire department and in the past, I was responsible for a support vehicle that had an air system on it. The system got an upgrade that included an PLC controlled air compressor. The company that installed the system went with the lowest bidder who went with an “off brand” PLC that controlled a motor starter that didn’t about 75% of the time when it was cold. So, imagine that we just paid close to, (well I can’t say how much but it was just under seven figures) to have a system overhaul and one of the primary systems wouldn’t start 70% the time when it was below 50° (60% of the time). Turns out that the PLC, that was reading the motor load when trying to start the motor, wasn’t able to get a high enough resolution to make accurate decisions as to the amount of load being placed on the motor when it was trying to start and when it was cold the load was heavier because the oil in the compressor was thicker. There was also a complicating factor in that the low-cost motor starter (rather than a VFD which I would have used) which was providing inaccurate (low resolution actually) load information would give up on its own long before being commanded by the PLC to let go. To further complicate the issue the company that installed the system didn’t really know how to program the PLC because no one there had used that type before so when it didn’t work they didn’t know what to do. They had to call a specialist from the manufacture who wouldn’t help unless he was paid which became a fight between the company that built the system, the company that installed the system and the PLC manufacture that lasted almost three months (in the mean time the air compressor didn’t work).
Fortunately (for the company that did the install), they also miss-wired the 240VAC system on the entire rig and put about 80% of the load on one bank of the AC panel (I’m not an electrician so I might get this next part wrong, it was explained to me about 6 years ago). The compressor would pull from both sides of the 240VAC panel with 80% of the truck’s 120VAC pulling from one side and 20% pulling from the other. Because of the imbalance the motor was showing a very heavy load I believe because the two 120VAC panels were trying to balance out through the 240VAC motor. Again, I’m not an electrician, I sorta get it but I can’t really explain it. The system was “Kinda” repaired in that there are “procedures” in place to start the generator however I’m not responsible for the rig anymore so I’m out of the loop.
Anyway, the point is just trying to figure out why the system didn’t work cost the city about twice as much is it would have cost had they just gone with the proper type of PLC and either a high-end motor starter or VFD. Cheap comes out expensive.
 
I don't know if there is a company that will do this for you.. However you can put your program on a circuit board.
Like some people here have mentioned, the safety ratings and ISO certs are one thing that many micro-controllers probably don't have. (I have not looked maybe they do).

However some of these chips are used in aircraft and state of the art defense stuff, so I would assume some are very robust, but building a board is a lot more than a chip being rated for stuff. Your board would have to be designed dummy proof with built in safeguards for incorrect wiring, ESD, vibration, ect.

There's an awful lot to know and test when you are making a board... how would the IO fail? How will it react to noise disturbances?
How to compensate for temperature deviations in the Analog signals and timing circuits?

I'm an electronics engineer myself and although I could design a board to take over a small PLC function, there's no way I would even try it as the time required to achieve the proper quality compared to a PLC off the shelf doesn't make sense unless you're making hundreds if not thousands per year and want the system to be a secret (military applications, for example...).
 
I always stay far away from proprietary hardware/software. This argument has come up numerous times, especially "Why not Arduino instead of PLC's?"
 
Adisharr, what hardware do you use which is not proprietary?

Not a good word choice at all on my part. I stay away from licensed software whenever possible and also stick with non-proprietary language types. What I mean by that is languages that are difficult to translate into another vendors language. Non-standard instructions, alternate scan cycle, limited language types (IL only), etc..

I'm probably in the minority by AB has never done me any favors for using any of their hardware and software. I've also found their support to be lacking compared to some of my other vendors that almost immediately answer any questions I might have.

Maybe I'm just not important enough - I'm certainly not going to affect their bottom line. Again, my personal experience. Many others love them to pieces and have great success.

I want to be able to walk someone (with no experience) through the process of installing support software on a laptop as well as helping me log into the machine over Teamviewer. I can do that now w/o any license nonsense.
 
Is there a way to get your finished plc program put on a circuit board?
Not in a simple way.

A PLC is nothing but a microcontroller running the manufacturers firmware.

Embedded systems, as they are called, are not programmed in ladder or similar PLC languages. They are usually programmed in C. And so is the PLC in it's firmware.

A PLC is much easier to program than an embedded system because it was designed to be easy. So for most people using PLCs, going to an embedded system is not an option.

And then we have the hardware, the actual embedded system. If it's completely custom someone needs to design, test and manufacture the hardware. That's also outside the scope of most PLC programmers so usually not an option.

So in short, for most people it's not an option to put the PLC on a printed circuit card. Assuming you want the same quality in the final product. And you also need the volume to offset the higher development costs.
 
I'm probably in the minority by AB has never done me any favors for using any of their hardware and software. I've also found their support to be lacking compared to some of my other vendors that almost immediately answer any questions I might have.

I'm with you... in the last 8 months the only query that was fixed out of 5 or so was a broken link on their website.

PLC stopped on a firmware error? cycle the power we don't know what that lengthy error message means.

Have to remove every FlexEx card from the rack with power on to reset it? Yes, that is intentional and the only way to reset them.

It literally feels like you're paying for someone to search for an answer in their forum.
 
Allen Bradley has always had fantastic support for me, and perhaps I've gotten lucky, but the support staff I've spoken with have been quite friendly and knowledgeable.

With this next job though, I'm on a tighter budget so I'm giving Automation Direct a go. Unfortunately, all we can get locally around here is Schneider and GE controls products, and there is almost no industrial/controls stuff, so no supply house stocks it.

That being said, there is only one other guy in town that does controls work, so that is quite good for me.
 
Allen Bradley has always had fantastic support for me, and perhaps I've gotten lucky, but the support staff I've spoken with have been quite friendly and knowledgeable.

To be fair, perhaps the guys I spoke to are knowledgeable and Rockwell's products aren't great. I just fail to believe that they would have something in the market with those two glaring problems... but people seem willing to see past their flaws so long as they can keep programming in their ladder editor.
 
To be fair, perhaps the guys I spoke to are knowledgeable and Rockwell's products aren't great. I just fail to believe that they would have something in the market with those two glaring problems... but people seem willing to see past their flaws so long as they can keep programming in their ladder editor.

I think it comes to the troubleshooting.

Some people struggle with ladder, and if you add AOIs or function blocks that makes them extremely uncomfortable.
 
I think it comes to the troubleshooting.

Some people struggle with ladder, and if you add AOIs or function blocks that makes them extremely uncomfortable.

I must admit that encapsulation is definitely a weak point with Rockwell... but the people I've met working with Rockwell (so far) don't strike me as programmer types.

This is not an insult to anyone, it's just an observation from the limited experience I've had with the platform and people involved in it.
 
I must admit that encapsulation is definitely a weak point with Rockwell... but the people I've met working with Rockwell (so far) don't strike me as programmer types.

This is not an insult to anyone, it's just an observation from the limited experience I've had with the platform and people involved in it.

I'd say that largely matches my experience. Here in the states, a large number of the facilities I see don't look at a PLC as something you program, they look at it as a way to shrink a panel full of relays. They take their brightest electricians, and give them programming software, and call them programmers. The normal AB use cases are a great fit for that user.

Not a nock on AB, not a nock on the electrician/programmers. Possibly a nock on management, but if it's working for them then it's hard to argue it's a bad practice.
 
I like that Opto-22 board quite a bit, because it uses an extremely sturdy and well designed carrier and interface to connect low-level I/O pins to a wide-spread and de-facto standard I/O product. You can buy Opto-style modules from a wide variety of vendors, and they're as close to an everlasting product life as you could hope for.

While the Raspberry Pi's CoDeSys runtime still isn't supposed to be used for real industrial processes, I suppose I might risk it if the downtime costs were low.

The principal risk of going to an Raspberry Pi based control system is, in my opinion, the longevity and robustness of the main boards. The product has only been around for about six years, and while there are eight different models, the part that really counts (the GPIO header) has remained largely the same.

A major benefit of using CoDeSys on the RPi is that if the Raspberry Pi hardware becomes unavailable or proves to be unreliable, the basic PLC code can be easily ported to a heavier-duty CoDeSys-based platform.

For a car-wash system, it's unlikely that complex or obscure libraries or platform-specific functions will be necessary.
 
Indeed Ken. The Raspberry PI was never intended for that but I do like the power it gives you as an "add-on" such as if you want a cheap web interface to an older system. Node red gives you a lot of flexibility without the need to be a code-monkey. I understand that there are also industrialized versions of the board. With that said I'd NEVER think of using that to control an industrial process.
 

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