Daily Industrial Automation News Roundup:
Today we’re covering news from ABB, Balluff, Maple Systems, Advantech, Siemens, Softing, Rockwell, Parker, SoftwareToolbox and more in our Automation Morning Show for Friday March 17, 2023.
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Shawn M Tierney
Technology Enthusiast & Content Creator
Have a question? Join my community of automation professionals and take part in the discussion! You'll also find my PLC, HMI, and SCADA courses at TheAutomationSchool.com.
Shawn is a lifelong Technology Enthusiast who as a pre-teen in the early 80's discovered his passion for programing on the newly released Apple II and VIC-20 computers. After earning a degree in Electronics, Shawn worked as a Certified Automation Specialist for 25 years before leaving to focus full time on teaching online PLC, HMI, and SCADA courses at The Automation School, as well as publishing industrial automation news, interviews, and how-to articles & videos at The Automation Blog.
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Hi Shawn, I work for Digi-Key as a member of our Automation & Control Team. I wanted to reach out to you regarding a recent post you made regarding an article on our website. (When and How to Select PLCs, PACs, and IPCs for Process Control in Industry 4.0)
I wanted to talk to you regarding the inaccuracies in the article and see what we might do to make this correct. From my understanding PACs and PLCs are related but the PAC is considered to be more advanced and is capable of C++ programming among several other languages under the IEC 61131. Personally, I prefer Ladder Logic myself but my experience in PLCs is limited in relation to yourself. I would really like to see if we could talk if you are open to it. We of course want to make sure that anything we share is accurate, and if it isn’t, we need to fix it.
Good morning Eric,
First, I’m a big fan of Digi-Key’s blog, and often feature those stories in my daily news show.
Second, since I’m self employed and time is my most precious commodity, I’ll apologize ahead of time for keeping this brief.
It would’ve been nice if the programmable controller industry adopted a standard for what a PAC is, but they haven’t.
And as someone who has been using and teaching PLCs and PACs for 33 years, and currently teaches courses on the #1 PAC brand (Rockwell) and #1 PLC Brand (Siemens,) I can tell you they both program using IEC-61131-3 languages, And neither program with C++.
Now, some of the smaller PLC/PAC vendors (PLCnext, Grooov Epic, Codesys,) actually provide a PLC soft engine running on top of Linux hardware. This allows the use of other languages and software, but even there the products are sometimes called PLCs and sometimes called PACs.
If you’d like to discuss this more, please feel free to use the “contact” link in the top menu to get in touch and we can chat some evening via MSTeams or phone.
Keep up the great work,
Shawn