Total_newbie
Member
I have next-to-no experience with PLC programming. I am a C programmer, and have an application (in C) running on control PC which needs to get some real-time data (pretty slow, 1 Hz or so) from an external device which normally is configured to connect to PLC via Ethernet connection. It looks to me like I have two ways to do this.
1) Get a hardware PLC as an in-between (between device and my PC control software), and then poll the PLC (I would probably connect to PLC via RS-232, as I have done this before...) for data for my C application.
2) Have software emulator running on my PC (RSLogix?), and have external device connected through that.
At least one advantage of (2) is that I don't have to buy another PLC (though I don't know price of software emulator software...).
An advantage of (1) is that I wouldn't have any overhead of the emulator running in background on my control PC (I do have to make sure that nothing interacts adversely with control software...).
Does anyone have any input regarding this, or some other solutions which I may be missing?
Thanks
1) Get a hardware PLC as an in-between (between device and my PC control software), and then poll the PLC (I would probably connect to PLC via RS-232, as I have done this before...) for data for my C application.
2) Have software emulator running on my PC (RSLogix?), and have external device connected through that.
At least one advantage of (2) is that I don't have to buy another PLC (though I don't know price of software emulator software...).
An advantage of (1) is that I wouldn't have any overhead of the emulator running in background on my control PC (I do have to make sure that nothing interacts adversely with control software...).
Does anyone have any input regarding this, or some other solutions which I may be missing?
Thanks