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Ladder Logic running on an Arduino UNO
Happy Canada Day! Some of you may wonder if I’d fallen off the face of the Earth, but the truth is life just gets busy from time to time. Just for interest’s sake, here’s my latest fun project: an...
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The Ladder Logic/Motion Controller Impedance Mismatch
Motion control is pretty complicated. There’s been something really bothering me about the “integrated” motion control you find in PLCs these days (notably Allen-Bradley ControlLogix and Beckhoff...
View ArticleAnnouncing: Patterns of Ladder Logic Programming
You may have noticed I recently added a new section to this site: Patterns of Ladder Logic Programming. My goal, as usual, is to try to help new ladder logic programmers come up to speed faster and...
View ArticleOffline Changes to a PLC Program
As a PLC programmer, you’ll often be asked to do a change to an existing system. If there’s a significant amount of functionality to be added, you generally get your changes ready “offline” and then do...
View ArticleStart your own Automation Blog!
One thing I’ve discovered about automation blogging is that it’s a pretty lonely place. Don’t get me wrong, there are a couple gems out there, but I don’t find many people writing about what it’s like...
View ArticleHow to Write a Big PLC Program
Staring down the barrel of a big automation programming project is intimidating. It’s hard to even know where to start. Even when you’ve done a few before, you’re only marginally more confident the...
View ArticleWhy good ladder logic looks like it was written by an 8 year old
When traditional PC programmers see ladder logic, they think ladder logic programmers are terrible programmers. Being both a .NET developer and a ladder logic programmer, this has caused me a lot of...
View ArticlePLC Programming goes Imperative
Decades ago, computer science emerged from the dark ages of assembly language programming and created two new languages: Lisp and Fortran. These are two very important computer languages because they...
View ArticleIdiomatic Ladder Logic
I want to talk about the concept of “idioms” or the idea of “idomatic” when it applies to programming languages. Python is said to have “strong idioms“: One reason for the high readability of Python...
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Focus on Part Tracking
There are many ways to visualize your program at a higher level. Take a look at this model for a second: I tend to focus on Part Tracking as a core part of my programming work. You can think of the...
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