Hi

[lchamarthi 2]

Hi, I am approaching you because I am in little confusion about career further step. As you guys are good experts here in this forum, hope could give me a good guidence to proceed. I am basically good Omron PLC & HMI developer with 5+ yrs experience. Now I would like to add one more skill ( one of the below mentioned). I did the ground work for this. VB or MATLAB or LABVIEW or VC++ But out of all, which one will be more demanding and utilizing PLC, HMI base too (i.e. earlier experience too) Could you suggest or help me in detail about this Thanks Lakshmi Edited 2 Sep 2008 by lchamarthi

[Mike Dyble 0]

I would look at VB and VC++ and try and get some experience of these. However before you branch out you ought get experience of different makes of PLC's. I dont know the situation in India, but in the UK the 2 big names are Siemens and AllenBradley (Rockwell). So try and cover the local market leaders.

[lchamarthi 2]

Thanks for the suggestion

[pandersen 0]

I would go with LabView - I think it has more applications in the automation world than VB or C++, outside of making your own HMIs with VB.

[paulengr 44]

Matlab is strictly an engineering tool, and one that I only see used in certain circles. It's a good tool for matrix algebra. If you are not doing matrix algebra, it's probably not the best tool. Labview is similar in nature. It is heavily used in certain industries as the HMI, but not much outside of that. It has a very unusual language that is sort of a visual representation of the Algol family. The problem with that is that you're learning a language way outside of the normal world. But because of it's background (interfacing to lab instrumentation), if you can get a driver for what you want to talk to, it is very good at signal processing. VB is no longer supported by Microsoft. That's the downside. The upside is that it is still widely used. Inside of HMI's, VBA (a derivative of VB) is the most common scripting language. I expect to see a transition to some other language in the near future for all the HMI's that use it because of Microsoft's actions to try to kill off VB. Outside of that, VB is very good as long as you are trying to interface Microsoft products (such as Office or SQL). At the current time, VB is still preferable to .NET for Office interfaces. You will almost always have to buy some sort of software to interface to PLC's since there are no native PLC interfaces (such as an OPC server), unless you want to do something very low level such as write your own Modbus/RTU or Modbus/TCP interface. That's the downside of VB...it does not play well with others. C++ is a systems language. Hands down you can interface it to almost anything and use it to do almost anything in a PC or almost any other piece of hardware with a CPU (embedded systems). Despite massive improvements, C (the base language without the object oriented crap piled on top) still reigns supreme in terms of speed. Almost all operating systems (except very low level code) are written in C. You can find a C compiler for almost any CPU. The funny thing about C (and C++) is that it wasn't intended to be a standard language at all. The guys who wrote it (Kernighan and Ritchie) developed a core language and a set of libraries. They expected all the libraries to be extremely non-standard just like every other language at the time. Interestingly enough, most companies and operating systems (except Microsoft) have taken great pains to try to be as standardized as possible when it comes to the standard C/C++ libraries, and even the nonstandard ones. They didn't go as far as Java (which is attempting to achieve binary compatibility), but in general, you can compile and run almost any C/C++ program on any operating system anywhere with very few minor changes. VC++ is just Microsoft's attempt to mess up a useful language. They removed many of the standard libraries and gave you a very VB-like development environment. This means that any programs written in VC++ are not going to be able to run on anything except Windows systems, and not portable beyond Vista since Microsoft is taking away COM/DCOM. In this sense, it has all the same limitations as VB. Unlike VB, it is still possible to access most of the standard features of C/C++ and still make it work well if you know what parts of the language have been damaged by Microsoft and which ones are still standard. You missed one other major language, Java. It has the closest performance to C. Unlike every other language so far, if you write something in Java, you can pretty much expect it to run in almost ANY environment anywhere. Java does this by creating generic binaries and embedding all the machine/operating system specific stuff in the "virtual machine" part of the system. The same program will work, unchanged, in Windows, Mac, Linux, and almost any other system out there. This is the same model that Microsoft took with .NET except that each new version is incompatible with the older version and that it only runs in Microsoft environments (so it runs in Windows with version XXX of .NET, and....nothing else!). C++ is the next closest thing to that. It interfaces well to almost anything related to web interfaces. It also does extremely well when it comes to security applications and interfacing to databases. These are the areas that are it's strong points. It also does very well with outright network interfacing. There are versions that work in embedded systems. It will interface to Microsoft Office products about as well as C++. It is not particularly strong when it comes to PLC interfacing but it is not as weak as VB if you are going for a "native" style interface. COM/DCOM interfacing is pretty lousy but there are OPC client packages you can buy that take the pain out of that. The object oriented stuff is much more highly developed compared to C++.

[BobLfoot 302]

you have received some excellent now allow me to add the following: Before deciding which next add-on skill to acquire, look 5 or 10 years into the future and guess, yes I said guess what field or area you want to working in. Once you make that choice then read the professional journals of that field and determine the skills that field will need in 10 years. Now pick the skills that will head you in that direction. Practical application: If you are looking at a process field were MATLAB or LABVIEW play a key role today and will in the future that kind of sets the path. If however you're looking more general automation and data handling then a structured language {VB, VC, C++, JAVA, XML, HTML, SQL...} would be a better fit. Hope this helps. One last thought - don't rule out the unrelated. For example, sales, education or management basics may not appear to relate today, but what if in 10 years you are project manager and must guide a team of 25 others, the management or education courses could pay off big if you have the skills when needed.