PLC and controls

Built on it

• Controls and PLC — Schematics, terminal plans, PLC I/O, virtual commissioning.
• Electrical controls and automation (schematics, PLC panels) — Harness and cabinet wiring, building electrical and drawing tools for control panels in CadCraft, with four calculation sheets: wire drop, supply budget, panel heat and PLC response.
• Material handling — Conveyors, stations, AGVs, PLC emulation.
• Robotics — Robot cells, reach, cycle time, URDF.

Use it in your add-on

Name it in your manifest's needs. When someone adds your add-on, their account brings this engine too, and every edition loads it the first time your add-on needs it. Version ranges arrive with AL.13.

{
  "id": "com.example.my-addon",
  "apps": ["cadcraft", "modelcraft"],
  "needs": ["engine.plc"]
}

Methods and standards

Planned and partly written: a Structured Text parser and checker, the standard timers, counters and edge blocks, ladder as a power-flow graph, a scan-cycle runtime on simulated time, and plant models integrated exactly. Written from the published standards and format descriptions; no other PLC software was read.

Limits

Planned, not available. The written library has no arrays, structures, enumerations, user types, pointers, classes or actions in Structured Text; only Structured Text and ladder in PLCopen files (function block diagrams, instruction lists and sequential function charts are named as problems); simulated time with no scan duration model, so it says nothing about a real CPU's timing; no retentive memory, no multi-task scheduling and no online change. It is not a safety-rated controller.