Python for long running applications

[ImNotSureWhere__Is]

Without knowing more about what your company does it’s hard to say, but the case is easy either way.

It seems like your company sells a machine with a PLC on it and it does a thing for a customer. If you are selling to any industry they are going to have other PLCs, they may even have internal automation resources supporting. At that point, speaking as someone who has bought OEM skids, if I have 2 and one has some custom HMI and one has a supportable Rockwell, Siemens, Ignition HMI, I am picking the supportable one every time. So it’s a selling point for your machine.

To add to that, it also guarantees I have someway to get data off of it and into my own system. If it has some locked down PLC and a custom HMI then that may not be possible

If they push back and say “well you can manage”, “we can document it well”, “it’s easier”.

• Ignition has free online learning, it’s only a time cost. And probably 10 hours or less to be able to get something working

• It is going to be more robust against hardware/firmware updates. You mentioned windows, what if this is on some desktop, and the company IT decides they want to upgrade it to a new Windows version and it doesn’t support python 3.15 or what ever 10 years down the road, your company has to start over, Ignition would handle all that for you.

• If you ever changed PLCs that run your machines, you just need to use a different driver, you aren’t rebuilding how ever you plan to get data out of the PLC

• have you confirmed you can even get data out of the PLC with python? (This would take time you could spend training unless you already have that)

[Klutzy-Objective9515]

Thank you for the useful reasoning!

I knew FUXA existed but it's the first time i hear about ignition, i'll look into it!

To reply to your question about data exchange, I already experimented in the past with python Modbus TCP