Author Topic: Program Development  (Read 12403 times)

cch1955

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Program Development
« on: January 10, 2008, 09:13:49 AM »
In using TRiLOGI to develop programs for industrial applications a user can go at it many ways: All ladder programming, Ladder with a few Custom Functions, or mainly with BASIC in Custom Functions and a bare minimum of ladder circuits.

What style do you recommend to make development rapid, clean understandable program flow and solid application operation?

I know you could say ? Each application calls for a unique approach and combination of the tools based on the programmers analysis of the processes?  but I?m hoping for a general ideology statement based on your broad application and development experience with TRiLOGI.

Thanks





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Re:Program Development
« Reply #1 on: January 10, 2008, 10:11:55 AM »
For On/OFF control of digital I/O you can't beat the ladder logic. The ladder portion of the program is very compact, very fast compared to doing the same thing in BASIC. This is a reason why ladder logic programming is still widely used today in automation (some survey says greater than 70% !) regardless of all the fancy acronyms of programming languages available today for programming high power PCs or web site.

However, ladder logic is very cumbersome for handling data processing that involve more than bitwise logic. A high level language like BASIC can handle these much more easily. That's why we invented the ladder+BASIC. In fact we do not even provide those powerful TBASIC commands in ladder logic equivalent (yes, it can be done as can be seen from those traditional ladder logic PLCs that attempts to handle everything in ladder logic, such as adding two numbers together using ladder logic). This is because we don't think it make sense to use ladder logic say to try to receive an ASCII string from a bar code scanner and extract out the the first two and last two digital, add them up and then convert and format them into a string and send out to a serial printer or dial a modem. Whereas all these jobs can be easily handled by TBASIC custom function triggered by a ladder logic condition.
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cch1955

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Re:Program Development
« Reply #2 on: January 10, 2008, 12:04:24 PM »
I appreciate your response to this question.

I agree ladder works very well for simple machine functionality.
TRiLOGI Basic does complex tasks well. I think the most tedious develpoment is to navigate between the ladder and the functions so you don?t "hang up" the scan in a function.

Great products ! Thanks for the efforts.