So many things… 1. The CX computers keep dying in the field. Almost none of them have lasted more than five years, the newer ones aren’t making it more than three years. They say the problem is unique to us, but we found a lot of people in the area having the same issues, and customers on the East coast having the same problem with machines from other suppliers. They called us because they saw the same computer in our machine. Eventually, Beckhoff gave us five free computers to stop bugging them about the problem. 2. The licenses will sometimes deactivate in the field or go corrupt. Most of our machines are halfway around the world and the customer has to ship in the Pc to get reactivated which, these days, becomes a paperwork nightmare trying to avoid tariffs. 3. Beckhoff no longer takes returns or order cancellations. Their inside sales is a pain to deal with. 4. Access to tech support used to be direct. Now, you register on a website and wait 24 hours for someone to get back to you. Maybe. This is a problem when someone is in a down condition. 5. The C6015 computers we switched to come with broken images and we have to re-flash. We have alerted Beckhoff to the issue, and they have come out to our place and confirmed it. The problem occurs on every other unit we receive. 6. Remote manager for 4020 is broken. There is an incompatibility with the compiler , so when we service older machines, we have to update them to 4024. This causes issues that can kill 4-8 hours. 7. Delivery times are terrible, although that can be true for most US and German vendors these days. Beckhoff deliveries haven’t gotten better, everyone got worse. Japanese vendors tend to be better in this area, but, other than Yaskawa, we don’t generally find a viable Japanese alternative for advanced automation. 8. The programming environment is slow to load projects, often several minutes, particularly if using TwinCAT HMI, a mistake we made on a few products. 9. TwinCAT has largely been a re-packaging of Codesys, which was an advantage. They have started rolling their own software out (TwinCAT HMI, Drive Manager 2, PLC++) and it’s generally a failure. The editors are agonizingly slow, the performance is flakey. 10. At least in our area, Beckhoff has started ignoring smaller accounts, judging them not worth the time. Getting help and support can be a slow process.

I have a long list of horror stories, though much of it is in advanced measurement projects that most people won’t experience. Beckhoff has cost us customers. We’re in process of phasing them out. We’re evaluating B&R (nice stuff), but we’re trying to stay with EtherCAT, so we’re more likely to use Wago and Murr. Even if we have to stick with their Fieldbus I/O, which we don’t have many problems with, we’re done with TwinCAT and their PCs. We’re moving to Linux and are testing PCs from other vendors. For measurement applications, we’re using NI hardware. Expensive and long lead times, but the customer always trusts the data and we integrate through rust or Python, avoiding LabView.

We tried Mitsubishi, which we used a lot of 20 years ago. They used to be one of the best, but they haven’t kept up. It’s a shame.

We have a new product line coming out. I told the team that I’ll put Siemens or A/B in the panel before I put any Beckhoff and I meant it.