The crazy cost of PLC programming 

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.

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

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 :)

​@@thomaspayne4090a public tender can ask many things from a company. Usually you will ask for ISO Certs, but you can exclude any companies below based on size or capital.

Very good point!

Delta PLC is free

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.

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.

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! :)

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.

"You can buy better, but you can't pay more"...not a slogan any company want to be associated with for sure!

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.

Great first step. No wonder they are popular among mere mortals.

There's limitations with beckoff

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 :)

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.

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.

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).

Not paying for the development was what this whole video was about.

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.

and if you’re video’s about something else entirely, like automation for deployment/monitoring/testing or OT networks, then I have no idea 🤷‍♂️

Rock on! Thanks for your kind donation!

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.

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.