Arduino PLC

The Arduino PLC and the Arduino PLC IDE... there has been a lot of buzz around it since it was announced recently. I'm a long-time user of the Arduino eco-system and have been using their IDE for over 10 years for various projects. Guess if I was surprised when they released their new IDE aimed at the industrial automation industry! The Arduino PLC IDE only supports one board right now, the Arduino Portenta Machine Control, and luckily I had just been using one of these boards for another project recently, so I could try the new PLC IDE that Arduino have released.

I thought I'd share my initial impressions, findings, praises & complaints with all of you by making a YouTube video where I go through the complete process of installing the IDE and configuring one Arduino board to run a simple PLC program.

Please support this channel by either:
- A donation by using the "Thanks" button under the video

0:00 Introduction
3:10 Download & installation
7:25 First start & impressions
15:46 Version control?
18:31 OOP
20:11 Connect to PLC
26:13 License activation
28:11 Compile & online change
34:25 Wrap-up

#arduino #plc #softwaredeveloper

[andrearichetta_Arduino]

thanks for the review, really honest and appreciated! we at Arduino are working hard to provide a smooth experience, as usual, also into the industrial world. some replies to the video's questions.

- the IDE PLC will be available for the upcoming Arduino OPTA micro PLC, expect in Q1 2023
- thanks for all the suggestions regarding the IDE itself.
- we will fix the broken links here and there (in the docs website) , there's a lot of effort behind the scenes.
- Regarding the CLI integration and the CI builds, the IDE itself relies on the Arduino Command line interface, that is installed with the IDE tools, along with the core needed for programming the Arduino Portenta Machine control. we don't have a specific usecase for that but your suggestion is really interesting.

thanks! Andrea

[JakobSagatowski]

Since I did this video I discovered that there is some EXCELLENT documentation available if you go to "Help → Index". Also, under the "Use object oriented features" there is a setting for storing the project in multiple files "Multiple files project" (though ST-code is still stored using annoying XML-annotation). Again, this was just a first quick impression. There will be more videos about this IDE coming, so stay tuned!

[simonjonsson]

Under the "Use object oriented features" there is a setting for storing the project in multiple files "Multiple files project".

[chuckykillerLEB]

I see them for now like the competence for small famous PLCs, a competence for logo, Micro800, FX, and Click Plus. Giving the full connection for Iot and Industry 4.0 needs. But no body knows how far are they going to go... 6 years ago I never thought I could see Arduino as a PLC.

[RogerGarrett]

Ahh, how technology progresses. Decades ago, when PLC "programming" was done by plugging actual hardware modules into a physical programming board, I joined a tiny startup whose objective was to create a way to completely eliminate the hardware logic modules and programming board, to do it all entirely on an IBM PC AT, debug on the PC, RUN the code directly on the PC, the PC connecting directly to the factory machines. The user interface would LOOK like the programming board and the programmer would use drag-and-drop to place logic modules, just as if he were doing the normal PLC programming (since, heck, there were so many PLC people who were expert in that all-hardware approach, we'd have a ready-made market). I was the software engineer on the project, along with the "money guy" (who was also the fellow who came up with the entire concept) and a hardware guy (to develop the board that would plug into the PC and interface with the factory floor equipment).

I spent a good part of a year designing the software, a graphical user interface (when graphical user interfaces were just in their infancy, few tools to help in the design) as well as doing test runs of the user's design to verify that it operating as expected (and according to the then-common way of doing PLC programming). I got a LOT of it working. We even took it to that year's NCC (National Computer Conference, remember those??) and showed it, privately, to several potential clients.

Sadly, the money man never raised a penny for the venture (I had been working for [ eventual ] equity in the company, i.e. for free) and the hardware guy never got even the simplest interface board working. Eventually the entire effort fell apart.

Not too many years later several PLC-specific programming languages along with related IDEs were developed and replaced the all-hardware approach. So even if our product had been fully developed and on the market, our market would have dried up fairly quickly.

But, time marches on. Technology advance by leaps and bounds, ventures come and go or never get off the ground, and now even ARDUINO has gotten into the PLC market.

[chrisv-l]

This is a great start. It’s not until you get into real Industrial process control that you will see the importance of the ability to edit the program whilst its running without out any halting of the process while you make your changes. I think the Modbus protocol is a great choice to start with. Modbus developed by Modicon were the real first PLC's to arrive back in the late 70's. It was always open source so everyone knows it and how to use it.

[JacobMatz]

Unless they intend to license specialized runtime functions, what is the point of not baking the license into the hardware? Like if you paid for the hardware, unless you planned on casting it in plastic and using it as a paperweight, isn't it kinda a brick without the runtime functionality? or maybe i missed something.

[espenb]

I don't see support for PT1000. I think that is something they should have. Source in text would be nice for source control. But I don't now have to do that in FD, SFC and IL. And they need to support more protocols. But I would think that is comming.

[pedrocoimbra]

Hello
Arduino PLC IDE is just a version of LogicLab from Axel
axelsoftware

[sharg]

This gives me ideas for home automation at another level then the common "smart home" solutions.
Control heating by taking data from weather forecasts as well as hourly costs for electricity being a major but also include expected sunshine, wind...

[addhoardingprocrastinator]

Loved the video, but the price of the PLC board you are using, as of this post, is about 335.00 USD. I spent 575.00 on a S7-1200 starter kit about 3 years ago. It's been great having that to work out some C# coding I do to interact with S7 PLCs. But I had the money to spare at the time. Sadly not now. The license for the Arduino PLC is very inexpensive though I agree.

[VagosZacharias]

Pretty nice video Jakob! Really interesting seeing Arduino moving to industrial automation, especially with the long lead times we are seeing these days from the big vendors.
Looks a lot like Schneider Electric's ESME HVAC platform though, I mean like almost 1:1 - not a bad thing to be fair!

[gordonFromHKA]

This was fantastic and very thorough. I had gone through this process of commissioning the PMC for the first time a few days before I watched this video. And I hit all the same weird, quirky roadblocks you did! Every internal "wtf moment" you had, I was like "I know right?". Thank you for the quality work, and hope to see more Arduino PLC/IDE videos!
*P.S. The first time I downloaded the "IDE Tools", it did not include all the proper libraries. After I redownloaded the "IDE Tools" the next day, it had everything I needed for the missing RS485 libraries. There was no revision change on the "IDE Tools"...

[automation_jeff]

Very informative presentation on the new Arduino Opta PLC software, in fact I bought one just to try out. I've sold several different automation manufacturers lines throughout my career and I absolutely agree with you on the free software - just get the hardware out into field, that's where the money is.

[davidoscarsson]

Thank you, fun to see content from the industrial world.

[maltebergman]

I really hope they make it reliable for warm downloads comparable to ABB, being able to change basically anything (software and hardware changes) without a noticable restart of the CPU, just a gap of a few cycles of executing code. Then I could see use for this in process controls. That's the big problem with Siemens 1500 in my field, which I would guess they use as comparison, it's really hard to download anything big without restarting the system, getting hundreds of alarms, trips etc.

[yngsjo]

It would be nice to have the rp2040 (raspberry pi pico) added.

[janmrlth]

Love it! We just started to use 'Controllino's for a small project. Merry Christmas Jacob

[ElectricalElectronicSoftware]

Arduino PLC hardware is almost more expensive than other industrial PLCs, why Arduino PLC then? While Siemens Logo PLC 60-100 euro.

[beachdancer]

"Ardunio PLC" in my world means Arduino Public Limited Company. What does PLC mean here? "Programming little computers?" "Portable Logic Controllers?" "Possibly liked Comment?"