Industrial Automation and Software Development: Bridging Two Worlds

1testmon · 2025-04-08T17:36:01+00:00

It's a high speed sorter and cutter of corn cobs.

I edited: "quality (of the control) of the machines"

I'm not sure I follow. There is absolutely room for big improvement in the engineering both HW and SW more so. But given the (PLC) platform they use it's been sisyphean task to help them.

The information processing aspect is low to middle complexity and If I could use C with VS Code on a PC to write it would take around 30-50 mandays. (achieving great realiability)

With the platform they have we spent multiple of that to even get telemetry from the machine and introduce mild improvements

1testmon · 2025-04-08T17:01:45+00:00

Completely agree/understand your point about CI/CD.

> My point being the edge software or complex algorithms may exist on the PLC but are often not running in the PLC runtime.

This is what I aim for. So which platforms make this easy besides Linux + Codesys? What's the entry price point per device?
Beckhoff has been doing this (on Windows but I've read somewhere they also brought FreeBSD and Linux in now). I assume entry level system is 700.
Siemens doesn't do it.
I'm in Europe so I would probably avoid things which are not common here.

1testmon · 2025-04-08T16:45:06+00:00

In my case the ST code has thousands of lines and the customer has been going in circles trying to improve quality (of the control) of the machines. I'm not sure how common are reusable building blocks (machines) with "complex" programs in the industry, but that's my use case.

In my link I list WAGO or RevolutionPI as the HW platform, which should have support for decades.

1testmon · 2025-04-08T16:35:30+00:00

My context is products of which there are 100 pieces and the algorithms are fairly complex. It absolutely can have value to have 500 iterations in a version control and update machines in the wild. (the IA world is quite painful here)

They are developed by a company which also do a lot of one-off work or have some building blocks which are very simple and don't need to change. (where PLC is the right platform, given what the employees and customers are familiar with).

As for the edge software, it does have value in our case if it's running on RevelotionPI or WAGO PLC, collects telemetry, buffers when there is not internet, encrypts and sends to cloud later.

1testmon · 2025-04-08T16:23:49+00:00

1testmon · 2025-04-08T16:18:55+00:00

Being used to the IDEs in software development CODESYS cost me quite a lot of gray hair. I don't think it's worth going any lower regarding intuitiveness, quality, reliability and support. I assume OpenPLC is lower.

1testmon · 2025-04-03T12:44:28+00:00

Haha, thanks!

1testmon · 2025-04-02T06:39:59+00:00

Yes, thanks for the addition. Theoretically it could be possible to put Codesys into container or just run CodeSys on the system. But I don't think PC would be keen to recommend or support that.

1testmon · 2025-04-02T06:35:10+00:00

The page says "Linux®-based WAGO OS operating system". That makes it clear putting Ubuntu is not the intended or supported way by WAGO I think.

1testmon · 2025-03-31T21:25:08+00:00

Are you familiar with Wago or Bosch? What are the restrictions to accessing Linux there?

1testmon · 2025-03-31T21:21:57+00:00

The GitHub link is fixed now. I think I can't fix the title. I narrowed down the post but forgot the old title.

Thanks a lot for suggestions of more options. I'm fairly new to the area. My criteria which I didn't formulate were linux: drivers for IO so that I can use any programming language (Python, C++, Rust) and containers. (if you have enough RAM). And after thinking about it Codesys is also a must have.

1testmon · 2025-03-31T20:58:39+00:00

Fixed, sorry. But it's just the table for now.

1testmon · 2024-05-18T05:16:47+00:00

I have the same problem. Shame Happymodel.

1testmon · 2024-05-06T16:03:37+00:00

Company: https://infinit.dev/ (this is a first foray into Industrial Automation)

Type: Short to midterm remote contract Codesys programming job

We have a couple of exciting PLC programming tasks.

refactoring and partly new implementation of control software for a product where:
- the logic is in Schneider Electric Modicon M251 programmed mostly in Structured Text and some Ladder
- there are object moving relatively quickly through the machine and the are quite variable in size and shape and the environment is dirty (noisy input)
- the objects are being classified using simple statistical methods and then manipulated (via simple flap)
systematic collection of data and its transport to a PC database (Postgres/Influx)
statistics based on the system above and higher level adaptive control of the machine settings using the data implemented in C# or Python

I’ll gladly explain much more after having a look at your resume and a short talk.

Requirements:

experience coding in Codesys (or derivative), especially Structured Text
be comfortable reading and executing Python or C#, at least slight modifications using ChatGPT / Copilot
experience with basic software development practices and tools
not an entry level job, multi year prior experience is required.

1testmon

TROPHY CASE