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Recently I trying to learn Ladder Logic programming for PLCs, but I want to know if there is any IDE to create Ladder programs better that Step7 or cx-programmer? Is there any plugin for Visual Studio or Netbeans that I can use? Finally, is it better to work with PLCs under Linux or Microsoft Windows?

UPDATE 1 : After googling about this, I found out that Ladder programming is not depend on the PLC brand or its model, so I did not mentioned any brand in my question.

eglease
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Ali Foroughi
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6 Answers6

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What is your goal? In almost all cases, your IDE is dictated by the PLC manufacturer, and your PLC brand is spec'd by the customer when they buy the machine. They spec the PLC because they need to have something that they can go online with for maintenance and troubleshooting. Since the software is proprietary and absurdly expensive, they don't want to get a new software license for every machine in the plant and have to relearn new software, while they are bleeding money of manufacturing downtime.

So if your goal is to enter the industry, you want to find out what plants in country tend to use. In North America it's usually Allen-Bradley a.k.a Rockwell Automation, which is programmed with RSLogix 5000 (edit: the recent versions of RSLogix 5000 have been rebranded as Studio 5000). In Europe, it's typically Seimens, but I have no experience with them.

Ben Mordecai
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  • In my country , the Omron brand PLC is using more that the others, but actually I am a dot net programming that work with VS , and as you know , VS is a great IDE , It is not fair to expect find a IDE like VS to work with PLC , but at least I can search and use experiences of persons like you to find best IDE , It is my goal.and in Omron brand programmers are using cx-programmer, but I want someting more better if it exists. Anyway thanks – Ali Foroughi Feb 07 '13 at 04:27
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    I would say that in Europe it's more of a 50-50 split between Allen Bradley and Siemens Automation, but otherwise this is an *excellent* answer. PLC programming is more about what you've taken for granted than it is about feature-sets between competitors. – Richard A. Feb 07 '13 at 08:58
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    @AliForoughi, Personally, I've never seen anyone program a PLC without using the standard proprietary IDE that the PLC manufacturer uses. – Ben Mordecai Feb 07 '13 at 13:27
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    @AliForoughi Ben is correct - if you are programming an Omron PLC you must use CX-Programmer. There is no alternative. – J... Feb 07 '13 at 17:06
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PLC IDEs are almost always picked hardware first. With some obscure exceptions, you pick the hardware you want to run, and this determines the IDE. The IDEs are all proprietary and unique to each hardware platform. Rockwell Automation alone has three different IDEs to support their hardware lines, all licensed individually and very expensive.

If Omron is the most common in your area, it's a good idea to start with them. Once you get used to one type of PLC, learning more is really easy.

Jason Kennaly
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If you don't mind which PLC platform you're using, I really enjoyed my time with RSLogix. They have a free, training-level suite available here:

http://www.ab.com/linked/programmablecontrol/plc/micrologix/downloads.html

Richard A.
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I prefer RSLogix 5000. It's one of the easiest to work with and has User Defined Types and Add On Instructions to help with reusability.

user3666086
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    Please justify more. This sounds like an opinion-based answer. – David Brossard May 22 '14 at 17:36
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    I'm sorry, I'm new to this board and I didn't realize we weren't supposed to post opinions. I have been doing process control for 15 years and have used a number of different platfroms and IDEs. RSLogix 5000 is tag based, not addressed based, it allows for semi object oriented programming, and has online editing and I prefer it to something like Step 7 for those reasons. I have gotten into trouble with step 7 the first few times I used it because of the addressing issue. I'm aware now that you can do tag based, but at the time it was still tied to a memory address and errors happened. – user3666086 May 22 '14 at 18:11
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ABB has Control Builder (which is the product that I work on), AFAIK when somebody buys our AC800 controller they get the CB for free, at least the so called "Compact version" which is file based. The CB has ladder diagrams as well as all other 1131 languages plus some extensions like Function Diagrams.

Disclaimer Sorry if it sounded like an ad, just very passionate with what I work on.

AndersK
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I am primarily a high level language programmer, but have also done development on various PLC /PAC platforms, including Rockwell, Siemens, and Beckhoff.

If your goal is to merely get an introduction to ladder, nearly anything will due. You can download Beckhoffs TwinCAT software for free. It is only a 30-day license, but you can just continually reinstall every 30 days without issue. The great part of TwinCAT is that it runs on a Windows PC, so you can develop and test code directly on the PC and don't need actual Beckhoff hardware to play with. The ladder is a bit quirky, but the statement list portion is by far one of the more powerful. If you are a C-programmer you will feel very comfortable with Beckhoff, because they have duplicated a lot of C-like functions (e.g. memcpy and setcpy) into their libraries.

The Beckhoff platform is not all that widespread, but it would allow you to learn the principals of ladder and PLC/PAC programming.

BenMorel
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Steve Janisch
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