Grafcet / SFC Drawing package

[cjd1965]

Hi
Does anyone know of a nice to use (and possibly free) package (say like visio) that I can use to draw SFC charts for inclusion in a word document?
I have found words own drawing system a pain and currently use powerpoint

Cheers

 

[Jon R]

Have you tried the drawing package with Openoffice?

I just had a quick look at mine at it allows you to draw flow charts.

Jon.

 

[bkottaras]

Have you tried the drawing package with Openoffice?

I just had a quick look at mine at it allows you to draw flow charts.

Jon.

Another vote for the Openoffice app.

 

[jvdcande]

And another vote for OpenOffice.org

If you feel it isn't enough of a CAD package, you can add the CADoo add-in, which is also free.

Kind regards,

 

[cjd1965]

thanks all, I will download it and have a look

 

[FrancisL]

ControlDraw includes easy SFC Drawing function.
http://www.controldraw.co.uk/Website/SFCGrafcet.html
There is also a free version.

A more powerful SFC Editor called SFC Draw is built in but not in the free version
http://www.controldraw.co.uk/Website/Overview.html

See
www.controldraw.co.uk

 

[bara_hence]

For grafcets i like DIA..

Free and opensource...

 

[FrancisL]

OpenOffice and DIA are cheap I guess. But these and the other packages mentioned are not really SFC drawing systems, they are generic drawing package that know nothing about steps, transitions, branches etc.
Two clicks in ControlDraw will add a step and transition, a branch, parallel steps etc. This is much faster than any generic drawing system. So your free software will cost much more to use.
And ControlDraw also has a state model that enables the steps and transitions to be meaningful, charts to run in simulation mode - and much more.
I should also mention sfcedit which does know something of what an SFC should be.

 

[bara_hence]

Heres another one that maybe knows what a sfc is.. And free of charge of course

http://www.control.lth.se/grafchart/

 

[Doug-P]

Heres another one that maybe knows what a sfc is.. And free of charge of course

http://www.control.lth.se/grafchart/

Link doesn't work for me.

 

[FrancisL]

The link (it does work) is to Lunde Universities JGrafchart which I had forgotten about. Freeware, and still not comparable. Anyone got any experience of using it?

 

[cjd1965]

Francis...... how much is control draw?

I have found the open office draw package is OK for my needs so far.

I tried to use Dia before for a university database course to write telationship diagrams and I didnt like it because the templates were different to what i had to use at that time.. maybe i revisit it for grafcets when i get a chance

Cheers

 

[FrancisL]

cjd1965
There is a free version which does SFC's among other things.
The full package is around £1k, of which SFC's only account for a few percent of the capabilities. You can use it to generate All the documentation that a system requires, and I mean All. It provides Object based modelling for automation, the documents are an output from the models.
Francis