SoftPLC

[RichWargo 0]

Anyone have any experience in working with the SoftPLC? From what I can tell, it's a fairly accurate emulation of an A-B PLC-5, but on an industrial computer. Supposedly runs about 70x faster than a PLC-5, depending on what you use for a processor. Programming untilities look a bit on the primative side, though... A client wants me to evaluate it for possible use, in place of normal PLCs, as it is much less expensive. Wondering what, if any, downsides there are to it.

[navillusi 2]

SoftPLC's are certainly good for certain applications, especially when you want to put your process control and your process monitoring on one machine, however, there are downsides: 70x faster is often a little misleading, how fast does your network run? How fast doues the IO react? How fast does the process itself react? If you use a PC, think about how many times per year your PC needs rebooting due to a software crash or some conflict, then think about how many times a year a PLC will crash! If you get the SoftPLC to work on a stable platform then make sure the machine is locked down suitably so people cannot play and change the configuration, or you might just lose your process for a couple of hours!

[Gerry 13]

If the client is familiar with the PLC5 and has RSLogix5 s/w, then why not consider SoftLogix5? It is programmed with RSLogix5 and supports all the features of the hardware PLC5 that you can program with RSLogix plus a few extras - notably user-defined data types (similar to ControlLogix).