Generic PLC programming software

Is there any generic software that will program several brands of PLC's?

Nope. Never was. Probably never will be, despite IEC 61131-3 ideals.

Don't I wish!

Allen's nearly right; there never was one but it was called Cadepa. lolis

It was a FB (or maybe SFC, I only met it once) front-end which produced RLL for download. It produced large amounts of very inellegant code becuase it only used the simplest instructions from each PLC's instruction set.

Some UK integrators liked it because they could develop their code once and then use whatever the customers' favourite controller was.

Google/AltaVista search should tell you if it's still out there.

Also "Structured Text" comes close as it can be Imported/Exported with most IEC-61135 packages with minimal changes, but it's not RLL.

Cadepa created SFC programs that follows IEC conventions. It needed a translator to convert to RLL for specific brands of PLCS. It could not be used to download to a specific plc.

Cadepa was created by Famic Technologies:
http://www.famictech.com/
the same people that created Automation Studio: http://www.automationstudio.com/

Cadepa is still available:
http://www.famictech.com/corpo/ang/products/products.htm

There was one once, it was called LogiCAD. You had to draw your program up as if it was an electronics schematic, and with a preprocessor/postprocessor combination it was converted to different PLC languages. I have one laying around together (since the mid 90's) with the processing parts for Simatic S5, but I never really used it, apart from testing it.

I just quickly googled for LogiCAD and it seems it's still available, but now it's based on IEC61131-3. The company is called Kirchner SOFT GmbH .

Kind regards,