I have a small task of making some programming changes to a Beckhoff controller but have never even seen one of these things. My programming experience consists of nearly every family of Allen Bradley, Siemens, Modicon, Omron, GE, ABB and quite a few others. It surprises me that there are SO many small market controllers that are in the market place. Anyway, is anyone here familiar with the Beckhoff controllers??

I've used the Beckhoff TwinCAT quite extensively. Its a very powerful system. If you are still interested, I can may be able to help or point you to the right place.

Yes, Beckhoff is POWERFUL softPLC system. I have also used it. It is a bit overwhelming at the beginning but it can be learned quickly. It is based on IEC 61131 programming languages for ease of learning the language. Siemens, A-B, Modicon, etc most new PLCs use IEC 61131 to some degree.


If you have questions, post and I am sure we here should be able to help out.

Adam

You can donwload a trial version (30 days valid) of TwinCAT from www.beckhoff.com

Is it possible to convert Siemens S7 logic into the Beckhoff SoftPLC environment? I have some S7-317PN code that I'd like to migrate over to a Beckhoff TwinCat PLC system? Any ideas?

S7 SCL can be ported to TwinCat ST. Both conform to IEC61131-3 ST (I have heard that there are minor differences though), and as they are text-based, you can even copy-paste directly from one editor to the other.

S7 GRAPH should be the same as IEC61131-3 SFC, but you cannot easily copy-paste from one editor to the other.

For the other S7 Languages - STL, LAD, FBD, HiGraph, CFC - there is no 100% compatible Twincat/IEC61131-3 language.

Here is a 10 minutes introduction that help get you started:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h54gtseymrI