Coding the PLC

Details

CoDeSys, delivered with the starter-kit, allows to program in a few ‘languages’.  The most transparent to a person who knows Pascal, Basic or even PHP is the ‘Structured Text’.

The outputs and inputs should receive their distinctive names (for example IN1, OUT1).  Their value is set with a simple equation like: OUT1:=IN1.  The typical conditional commands (IF, CASE) and loops (FOR, WHILE, REPEAT) are also available.

Initially I had a great problem with understanding how a PLC program works.  The program is not executed/red once as it happens in a ‘normal’ application.  The PLC executes it continuously at a defined frequency. 

As a consequence it is not possible to do the following: IF IN1==TRUE (meaning if the button connected to IN1 is pressed) THEN OUT1=-OUT1 (meaning, change the state of the OUT1).  If we assume the button was pressed for 0.5 sec and the program is executed 60 times a second, the state of the OUT1 would be changed 30 times!  For experts of PLC programming such a remark must seem naïve.  For me, however, repetitive execution of the program was a difficult thing to get used to.

For most of the building applications WAGO deliveres dedicated libraries. Additionally one should check out the open-source libraries available at www.oscat.de.

More details about programming are available at "Functions".

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