The crazy cost of PLC programming
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- čas přidán 8. 11. 2023
- Are you an automation vendor and you're charging your clients for the PLC software?
That sucks. But there is an easy solution. Let me explain.
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Getting experience with popular Automation software like studio 5000 and TIA Portal was so unnecessarily hard as a student.
Glad to see Beckhoff being used more in the industry!
This is exactly what I hear all the time in the industry. Young people that had to struggle to even being able to learn what they wanted to learn!
@@JakobSagatowski The underlying motivation is much more sinister than "flogging the customer for money"; VENDOR LOCK-IN. Once you have "invested" in the technology, protocols, knowledge and vendor relations, it is incredibly hard to change to a different vendor. And THAT is worth multiples of the pennies they get paid for the dev tools.
So, don't expect any of the automation vendor giants to risk cannibalizing their own life support. Depending on which sector within "industrial automation", the possibilities of change varies. All high-value process will be last to change, because too much risk for the "user", but in building automation and adjacent lower-risk sectors, I think the change can be, as you say, quite rapid. There might even be a decent opportunity here, if someone can dig up the investment capital needed to get going (count me in, if you succeed).
@@JakobSagatowski Even as someone who majored in software engineering, plc programming has so many caveats. Many things (I use AB) feel a little unintuitive.
I fully agree, i have a background in embedded software and there all hardware vendors provide as much sample code as possible to get you started just to get you in their eco system and buy their chips, it was a bit of a shock to see how this is handled in the automation world. Version management is also hampered by these paid environments they cannot simple store the code as text or they choose not to do so
I agree with this entirely. PLC vendors would sell more hardware if programming their products was more accessible. With a global shortage of Controls Engineers, anything that can lower the barriers to entry would benefit everyone.
Benefit everyone but automation engineers already in business :) As a student I had access to everything needed to run job in company. Company paid for curses that I needed to expand my knowledge and I am now "multi specialised" automation engineer without spending a dime. But ofc. You can forget about starting Your own, single person business :) Is this that bad tho? I wouldn't want someone who have just "fooled around" in studio 5000 after school to program PLCs in my factory.
In the era of public tenders, where the lowest bidder wins, single person businesses would always win providing very low quality. With low entry threshold there is always big danger of incompetence. But hey, it's just my take on the matter :)
Which brings us back to Beckhoff. I even have my house automated with it, partly for the reason that the configuration tools of the various domotics are just way to expensive.
Full acknoledge! I'm mostly trapped in dealing with Siemens. My company and my boss are regularly out of their mind when I tell them what we'd need to buy next.
Not to mention the idea of... you put it absolutely right... letting my inner child explore new stuff on my own
Can you elaborate a bit more how this works in a bit more detail? As in Siemens was introducing new paid only features? Did your boss want more stuff and thought that it is just gonna be a 5 minute job? Thank you
Spot on Jakob 😁 i have been working for Siemens and have considered S7-1200 for my hobby projects, but after i saw the cost for the programming tools, i decided to use to codesys and a pi for runtime.
Completely agree! But there’s one more aspect that make vendors loose money. The Chinese non licensed copies industry. All that you described is what we see in North America and Europe. No non-license software allowed. But if you go to Asia and Latin America you can buy with US$10 one VM with all Rockwell or Siemens or any PLC vendor tools, “in any corner”. I can imagine how many people and companies in this places do this and how much money the big brands loose! One more aspect for them to think in a business model change!
Very good point!
There are Arduino, RaspPi and PC-based alternatives in industrial-grade housings. The problem is the industrial customers... They don't care that their contractors have to buy development software and teach their engineers obscure programming languages, they want the big names like Siemens, Rockwell, Modicon, Mitubishi, etc.
Making plc as your hobby is same luxury as being sport car enthusiast.
Like...wtf are those prices, average 1500 siemens plc costs 3k+ euro, on top of that you add modules, sensors, actuators, tia portal license, power supply, shelf...
The only way to learn plc now is at plant and be lucky it's enough developed for that.
Haha what a funny comparison! Now I'm not into sports cars, but I'd imagine that if I would get into that I would very much feel the same way as when I got into PLCs the first time!
Its why we are all hoarders and skip divers at heart, I have kept all software, licences excess hardware, hardware i have replaced etc... for 20+ years
Well PLC's have this pricetag for multiple reasons in manufacturing. There is enough competition of the big players. If it would be possible to do it cheaper, it would have been done by the PLC manufacturers. They are being pressured by the big machine engineering companies to bring prices down. And as well for machines built with 2m$ pricetag it doesn't really add up
For a hobby you dont really need a S7-1500. It is a high end CPU. Go with S7-1200 the low end CPU S7-1211 and it is a alot more cheaper. You use the same software (TIA Portal) and you can come a long way with S7-1200. If you want to try the fancy functions you can use the Virtual version and it is trial version for it! :)
The Allen Bradley model is terrible. You can buy better, but you can't pay more.
"You can buy better, but you can't pay more"...not a slogan any company want to be associated with for sure!
I couldnt say it better! This was one of the reasons why I moved vom PLC programming to other software development completely...
I'm fully agree with You. Costs for keepeing license active, or buying very new version of software are out of reach for many entusiast of factory automation. Furthermore the latest versions of these environment are not revolutionaly and we must pay only for ability to codning newest versions of hardware what is just a madness in my opinion.
I think you're mainly talking about the Siemens system, which is structured exactly as you describe. I am a PLC programmer and use Codesys. Which is the basis for many development environments. Among other things, e-cockpit / twin cad etc. Codesys is free, you only pay for the runtime on the PLC. You have a soft PLC to test and you can even run it on the Raberry pi. I agree with you on one point: it is difficult to learn codesys, especially to program correctly in object-oriented language. But there are now forums on this topic. A few more words about Siemens. These stopped a few years ago and are currently trying to catch up. The problem is that most of the programming in the TIA is completely unusable. The code or what they click together has nothing to do with modern, flexible programming. In addition, the business model here is simply no longer future-oriented and the development environment is buggy, slow and too expensive.
It depends how you program and what you are used to, it also depends on your understanding of the various languages, TIA is far from perfect but if you come from a Siemens background it is a doddle to use from basic drag and drop projects to as complex as you would like. What is modern flexible programming? Also, most vendors will sell you a dev license for TIA at a fraction of the cost or just give you one for a period to do your project.
Man, Siemens is not the most popular PLC producer without a reason. You are talking about modern, flexible programming, but who the fuck needs it in automation? Seriously, look at it and wonder a little. Most of "modern, flexible programming" concept is taken from IT. Do you truly think that automation engineer or maintenance engineer in BMW or Volkswagen factory knows and needs benefits taken from IT world? Of course not, he needs knowledge how to turn on a LED, check if his output is working correctly and so on. You may say that Siemens is stopped, I say he's in the perfect place where most of users use it without complaining and doubts.
I completely agree with this, the automation industry is so conservative compared to the IT dev world. But in the end it's all about money and market share. Also within the organizations I notice the people in OT are trying to keep everything a secret because they are afraid IT will take over if they start to collaborate or share knowledge.
I'm also in OT but from personal interest and history have a lot of interest in IT tools and software so I run into this all the time as well.
True. As a skilled programmer I can easylie programm everything and learn new languages and frameworks, but automation... But automation is such an outlandish industry, they comply to nothing everyone else does. God, TIA Portal doesn't even have enumerations! And they release a new version every year that costs a lot.
TIA Portal V19 finally added a new feature that looks like Enumeration (sorry I forgot the name), but it's only available in software unit (sad...)
@@jacobchan4697 Thats exactly what frustrates me about Siemens. They try doing something that looks like something else, but it isn't, so it only works in some strange conditions.
I showed today how an automated pipeline in Azure worked to the team. They are not used to automate things like test simulation deployment etc's so now I have scored myself an azure course in DevOps :-)
As an industrial designer with programming experience I had to get into PLC programming for the last month for a project, and I couldn't agree more with everything you say.
Once I asked to a software company specialized in CAD software, how much cost their license, and it was insanely expensive, and was worst, they only sell it to companies, no to individuals!
I like that this whole video is basically an ad for Beckhoff without actually mentioning any vendors by name 😝.
Beckhoff’s TwinCAT is free and uses Visual Studio, natively supports version control like Git, supports automated testing, has free support and good community support, etc etc etc.
This is not an ad for Beckhoff. There are other vendors that (more or less) are for free as well (Vanilla codesys, Arduino PLC IDE, etc.). Also, Beckhoff is not completely free. If you for example want to do static code analysis in your IDE, you have to pay £$€.
Also CI is horrible to implement currently in TC3 projects.. Let’s say you want to build the project -> PLC to run -> Run Unit tests automatically.
You need a license for that or regenerate the trial license every monday morning manually…
@@JakobSagatowski Yeah there are some paid addons for TwinCAT like static code analysis or the analytics workbench but those don't prevent newcomers or students from learning and getting their feet wet in the PLC world.
I wasn't criticizing you either, mostly just pointing out that not all PLC platforms have the problems you are talking about in this video since a lot of your audience is probably people new to the industry and wanting to learn.
@@nhibbs3 No worries, I wasn't taking it as critisizm. I want to point out that I am fully aware that not all brands are like this. If you look around on my channel, you will find a full-blown TwinCAT 3 course and content about some other PLC brands. All of this is done with 100% free development environments. This video is not about these brands.
@@jaans3712 I totally agree. While Automation Interface provides an extensive API, it requires a full Visual Studio environment, and it is difficult to get output from the environment, which means that build pipelines fail more often than not, for no clear reason unless you want to spend time running it in a non-silent mode so you can visually see what is going on. As Jakob says, it kills the desire to play and explore when every thing you want to do feels like running into a brick wall.
Thanks, Jacob🔥
RTU development has started to go towards the "free" route. The last few RTUs I've worked with provide a nice Linux runtime with APIs to access the install redis database, hopefully big PLC vendors also go this way
How I can convert a Twincat2 project to Twincat3 ? . I've a project that I need to convert it ? . Can you please help or just advice some links or documents that would help me ?
This also accurately matches to not just automation world, but also automotive software world.
Bravo Jakob !!!
Just came back from the SPS Nürnberg trade fair and the good news is many developers within the companies know this way kinda holding everyone back. So some changes are coming slowly. I also saw lot's of the newer plc players adopting many open source tools as the base for the PLCs. Sol let's hope they pick up popularity.
Fully agree. Needed of pay for everything - programming tools, support, community etc. make industry a decade behind from IT
This is not true. If you go for Siemens support it is free and can be payed for. If you make a ticket to get help you need to wait some hours but you will get help. The community is free for Siemens, you just need to get an account and you have all the manuals, application examples, there is also free software that you can try for several weeks.
Beckhoff development environment is free. btw, they piggyback off VIsual Studio.
Great first step. No wonder they are popular among mere mortals.
Bosch is going in the right direction with CtrlX Platform as well, but still you have to jump though some hoops to get the Emulator software... but its free. RevolutionPi is also an alternativ with industrial grade Hardware and Software where you can use free codesys tooling. But all of that is rather clunky to me. There are so many Garage Doors, Water Irrigation systems an so on that would not need a true PLC just remote IO + raspberry and python. Or if you need a GUI use Node Red. Its Production Ready!
Hmm wonder what Beckhoff is going to do when nis2 hits them 🤔
It requires sbom's when change log documentation.
And which tools do we get to scan the code for vunabillities 🤔 ?
Veey Nice Jakob ! i also think of the same that's why I moved to CODESYS but again that's not sufficient.
I agree with this video.
At this rate the vendors will start to bill the "Downloading to PLC" (as we seen in video games industry development), I used Modbus TCP in OpenPLC (linux x86 enviroment) with WinCC RT Advanced for testing before deployment, was interesting but OpenPLC feels the lack of a lot of tools, but feels good that we have options to the vendor.
Dunno about increasing the cost of the hardware - you're still paying in the region of $10k for just a CPU. Add on backplane, power supply, comms, i/o... It's about as expensive as it can get, especially considering what you're actually getting for those dollars
That is for Rockwell, Beckhoff has a pricing model closer to that described in the video, such that once you add up the hardware + runtime license costs it comes out about the same as a Rockwell CPU in total cost. And you don't have to pay for the development environment, and the hardware is much more powerful and capable than an equivalent Rockwell ControlLogix processor.
@@DavidFreiberger Agreed - I'm a big fan of Beckhoff! Unfortunately in my experience, the big players in my area are Rockwell and Schneider, with sprinklings of GE and Siemens.
It's not easy to move an industry onto new hardware. The unfortunate truth is that no one ever got in trouble for recommending an industry standard solution (regardless of the cost), but you're taking on a lot of business risk by recommending something people don't really know regardless of how much better it may be.
Risk in an industry that demands uptime is a no-go.
I would say that Siemens can be compared to Beckhoff for sure when you compare performance in hardware. Is it something specific you are pointing to? Curious here! @@DavidFreiberger I would say 10k for a CPU is expensive, even Siemens have cheaper CPU:S :)
Wish codesys had free git support and not having to pay $$ for the subscription (!!) for the professional version. Would also be cool if the file structure was "flat" and not embedded into a single project file such that one could possible be using any texteditor you'd want for writing ST.
Did bechoff open source their PLCs yet? I know Wago and Exor (HMIs with codesys support) has published SDK platform tools for their operating systems.
I also think this apporach make automation slow to evolve. Making big closed IDE with zero customization, pretending to do some Apple style "magic", when after all this is still normal pc program using IT standard solutions. So they can create next revolution tool like "Siemens Openness" that make simple things, super complicated...
Spot on, coffee for you! Cheers! :)
Rock on! Thanks for your kind donation!
I think you undersold the detriment that PLC tribalism is on the industry as a whole. In my first 5 years of industrial automation I met and worked with about 20-30 automation maintenance and engineering people and probably half of them had convinced themselves they can never leave because they "only know {regional monopoly} PLCs." I've seen companies dedicate tens of thousands of dollars and weeks of strain on the maintenance department to teach individual classes on revisions of an IDE that could literally copy/paste code between each other. Making a chance to learn an ecosystem a comparable price to a car has really built a culture of developers that fixate so much on superficial differences they can struggle to actually learn the strengths and weaknesses of different ways to solve a known problem when they encounter them in the wild.
It's not only the engineers but also the managers.
I've been an engineer in power and automation for more than 15 years and I often heard "we're looking for someone with Rockwell/Siemens/Schneider experience"
@@Johnsmith69448 ah, yes. That requirement has been the rule rather than the exception in my short time. I don't want to say I simply ignore job postings with that requirement but I think long and hard about why they're calling for it. I could understand needing/wanting someone with Ethernet/IP Motion experience but if I see "rslogix500, rslogix5000, Studio 5000 experience required" I get a pretty good window into the technical culture and a good sign that I should probably explore other options.
Yes, the tooling & the IDE(s) are very questionable... Be it the Codesys IDE itself or descendants using the Codesys SDK such as TwinCat (Beckhoff), eCockpit (Wago), E°PlcDesigner (Eckelmann), etc... My great hope lies in the "Codesys GO!" IDE, which is in the making and will hopefully copy a lot from Visual Studio Code.
I don't know much about PLCs but I've watched a couple of videos here (really good!). Isn't Arduino disrupting the industry with their PLC product and tools?
It's more of a DIY project rather than indstruial level that is capable of running a planet for example If I understand correctly.
@@OfirAviv1994 have you look into their Portenta and Opta products? They look very serious to me
Yes I have. Please check my other videos on this channel.
It would be great if there were better options for open source industrial software, but there are many reasons it’s not so easy. There’s a ton of risk & potential hardware compatibility issues. It’s more the firmware/hardware that needs to receive instructions and pass messages to other nodes.
The shift towards hardware licensing makes sense, but I donno. There are security issues.
I really wanted tooling that felt like traditional programming (with code), but PLCs are like half analog. so I think they want it to be hard to forget: however the PLC is switched/powered, at the end of the day, it’s not pure digital logic. But I really haven’t had too much experience here.
and if you’re video’s about something else entirely, like automation for deployment/monitoring/testing or OT networks, then I have no idea 🤷♂️
I don't know...Wago and CoDeSys have been around a long time but haven't gained much in market share.
I k ow there are a couple of old vendors embracing raspi as their core module. I think this is the way to go.
1) Not PLC but Arduino is very cheap.
2) I like Stateflow in MatLab/Simulink. After checking it makes a program on ST for PLC.
Siemens income for development software for their PLCs is about 50%. Programming a PLC can be very annoying and cost much money. The development software TIA-Portal is very slow and expensive.
I quit automation. It makes no sense to write boolean logic in such dumb way. The programming culture in automation is literally a decade or two behind normal programming. Just as mentioned in the video - community support is almost non-existent. Libraries do not exist (except vendor ones, that you usually have to pay for), and thus 99% of time a PLC programmer is writing a piece of logic that hundreds of programmers already made before. Imagine warehousing industry - how unique a code for conveyor control can be? Yeah; quite a lot actually, but it definitely can be standardized. But there are no libraries in PLC world, so I used to (re)write same dumb code over and over again.
Then I started writing code in python to generate that dumb STL code. And this got me wandering... why don't they just write python... or java, or C#? Even f*kn excel can generate code for PLC.
This is not true for Siemens to be honest. If you have contact with a sales guy he can help you a lot with support, also the support helps really quick. Librariers exist and there are a lot of them. The only negative side of the librariers is that they are so big so you need to scale them down becuase you dont really need all the functions in it. To access all of these you only need an account and it is can easily be made within minutes. You dont need to pay for libraries, dont spread lies. There are libraries you can pay for but there are much more libraries you dont need to play for.
For conveyor application if we talk about Siemens the new converter G115 have standardized conveyor solution that you dont need to program. The functions are already there, you tag the signals to right function and you are ready to go :)
In TIA Portal you can save libraries or you can add them from SIOS(Siemens industrial support).
Im curious, what PLC brand have you been working with?
This stuff can only be standardized if every supplier of every part communicating with the PLC in some way uses a protocol which is standard. But they don't. Thats the reason. Every machine firmware you find is somewhat different and thats why a PLC needs to adapt to handle all devices. Would be nice yes but seems to be a long way. And its not true that there are no libraries. Maybe with Siemens you pay for it idk, but other manufacturers offer a lot of free library functions to use (that their developers specifically created for their PLC).
Plenty of free options out there to learn
I think it's not that much of a cost for bigger companies, the problem is more apparent when some small company wants some kind of machine. The biggest money transfers are between Integrators and Companies. For me it costed nothing, my company gave me PLC, license and I'm giving free code and onlin technical support for our product integration thus reducing the cost for integrator. There are many companies like mine and we do our best to give customer full support.
I do think it's a big cost for students and people that are not into industrial automation (yet), which was my point with the video.
Delta PLC, please!
Hence TwinCAT is taking off as it is. And let's not get started talking about DCS.
Hmm for that Sum it’s cheaper to buy a pcb + chips + a single guy that writes the software..
Codesys is the answer. Either that or use automation direct PLCs.
Though the base of codesys is free not everything is. Something as basic as being able to do version control using Git costs 550 euro / developer / year.
All hail Beckhoff. I refuse to teach RS5000.
I'm sure many people from the free software community (and also the newer open source hardware community) would happily create a lot of the tooling if only they could get ahold of decent documentation without all the NDA red tape and annoying, pointless secrecy.
Even companies that have been fairly open about their proprietary communication protocols (I'll mention Regin in Sweden, since I was there (Exomatic) to influence that approach), are very secretive about how to program them, and the format of the device descriptions can be daunting.
You can find free engineering software online, if you’re looking hard enough.
It’s not that legal… but who cares? Give it a try and learn a bit.
Codesys FTW!!!!
Completely disagree. If the plc vendors make the software free to use, many more people will learn plc programming which is supposed to be good, right? wrong because the automation industry is not like the IT/programming where the industry is massive, and you can create as many softwares, apps, websites that can be useful, hence there is higher demand for these people. You cant go around and create plc programs and hope they will generate revenue like you can do with standard softwares, apps etc. So having too many plc programmers would be destructive for plc programmers bcs there is no huge demand. Also if a company buys your plc and you give them free software, then after two years they use it on different site, or they can buy a used plc, reprogram it and use it, if you give them free software licence they will be able to do that forever. in that case from where the revenue will come for the plc manufacturers?
VS Code isn't IDE, it's a text editor. Stop confusing Visual Studio (the real IDE) and VS Code.
twinCAT is free, you need a license only for modules and you get it when you buy them, so beckhoff is the best
(fuck siemens)