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u/Upbeat-Serve-6096 6h ago
VHDL and Verilog: ?
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u/Monochromatic_Kuma2 6h ago
That's more design than programming. You are not programming a device to follow certain instructions, you are designing a digital circuit.
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u/watduhdamhell 3h ago
Never knew this was a thing, very cool! I can see how you could do some cool stuff with it as a EE.
My expertise is centered around mega scale plant DCS, so every icon was essentially a DCS vendor system or an IEC-61131-3 language.
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u/Myrrddin 28m ago
Oh I see exclude Rockwell. 😜
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u/watduhdamhell 6m ago
Haha well PlantPax is certainly a thing but Rockwell are the small time player in DCS. They are UBIQUITOUS for everything PLC though, and I have seen people chain control logix PLCs together and make a DCS without PlantPax, and that implementation looked better the PlantPax? Anyway.
Neither are as good as something like DeltaV, but they are very competitive on price and over time will improve and Emerson will have a tougher and tougher time justifying the premium, as will all DCS OEMs.
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u/watduhdamhell 6h ago edited 6h ago
Just teasing a bit with the other meme posted earlier. I'm an engineer and programmer but domain specific, no "real" languages, so I thought it would be funny to just place ALL of y'all's stuff on the right side 😅
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u/SAI_Peregrinus 6h ago
Need G code on the left to even out the rows.
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u/SweetHomeNorthKorea 5h ago
Where does the hole punch go
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u/SAI_Peregrinus 5h ago
% G90 G17 G71 F100 G50 G53 G21 Z500 G00 Z50 G00 X10 Y15 G01 Z0 G00 Z50 G00 Y195 G01 Z0 G00 Z50 G00 Y375 G01 Z0 G00 Z50 G21 M30 %Roughly, for punching the holes in paper for a 3-ring binder. Dimensions measured by Mk 1 eyeball guesstimation.
Edit: also, I don't really speak Machinist very well. Just some hobby stuff, so if you crash your CNC hole punch with the above I accept no responsibility, you took random code from some random guy on the internet and ran it without checking!
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u/CorrectCombination11 5h ago
There are people who specialize in salesforce. Don't worry.
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u/tragiktimes 43m ago
Apex isn't really that bad. SOQL is alright as well.
Just niche specific.
Note, I dont program in apex exclusively or even to a considerable degree. I just maintain my organization's Salesforce environment and have been slowly optimizing it for the over the last couple years.
Unfortunately (or fortunately) Salesforce Administration is only about 10% of my job.
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u/ProtonPizza 5h ago
I’m working with some thermal systems teams currently and they showed me some systems built using Modelica. It was like I whole crazy world that I wasn’t even aware existed.
Not sure if this is what your involved with but saw Siemens and thought maybe similar domains.
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u/watduhdamhell 5h ago
Interesting! Siemens makes a ton of different products, but in this case Siemens is depicted with PCS7, which is a Distributed Control System. I am a DCS Engineer who has used or interacted with all of these guys, minus Yokagawa. I'm current the asset owner for a large DeltaV system.
FWIW, Emerson DeltaV is the superior product by far imo.m for 90 of use cases. It also costs the most to build and license, so. Make of that what you will!
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u/Arclite83 6h ago
I started as a CmpE and ended up in cloud architecture and AI, I miss being the guy on the left so much...
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u/vivi_sonce 2h ago
The second guy's tools all cost more than a car and none of them have version control
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u/yegor3219 3h ago
I've been both, haha. I've programmed PLCs in Codesys but also developed custom HMIs (Windows desktop apps) and later pivoted to back-end web dev.
I kinda miss how simple the PLC code is overall. What I don't miss is the responsibility to not make a toxic leak or blow up a huge pressurized furnace with that simple code.
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u/watduhdamhell 2h ago
Personally I love how the code base itself can be very simple while the actual result can be very academic. And while the underlying regulatory control can be simple for some units, it can also be very complicated for others. A cascade into a cascade into a cascade. And so on. But the actual code blocks themselves? Ezpz.
For example, regulatory control layers (PIDs, etc) manipulated by dynamic matrix controllers, manipulated by state space equations and optimizers, kalman filters... PhD level math that is not trivial at all.
All depends on how far you wanna go!
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u/horizon_games 5h ago
No one loves Siemens S7
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u/watduhdamhell 3h ago edited 3h ago
Seriously. Out of the stuff I've played with (PCS7, PlantPax, DeltaV, 800xA), DeltaV is the best by far, and it's not even close.
It's life on easy mode. Everything is a wizard, everything was made to work with everything else in the stack pretty seamlessly. It also costs me $40k/yr for software support for my relatively small installation (like, if need to download a hot fix or security update). Make of that what you will.
The Siemens suite in particular was like band aids holding band aids. All these different software packages acquired over the years from various companies and then very clearly shoehorned into a product called "PCS7." It was a disjointed mess, and the UI was laughable. Programming itself was easy enough, but the UI proper- I remember there being flyout menus in simatic manager with 50 fucking options. Like what is the point of a flyout with that many options?
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u/horizon_games 2h ago
Yeah they're trying their best for ~50 year old software tying a lot of the industrial automation industry together, but dang are the docs bad and the TIA Portal software simply so chunky and consuming
Still a useful skill to know, and interacting with the physical world via software is pretty cool
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u/Its_meme_not_meme 5h ago
I will be happy when I can see the back of OPC UA protocols
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u/cjb3535123 4h ago
Never have I hated external plc communication so much than when I’ve worked with opc ua
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u/macrohard_certified 3h ago
I need a captain for the symbols on the left
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u/watduhdamhell 3h ago
Ha
The top icons are IEC-61131-3 languages for PLC programming. Function Block Diagram (FBD), Ladder Diagram (LD), Sequential Function Chart (SFC), Instruction List (IL), and Structured Text (ST). IL is dead. ST is what you would recognize as a proper, turning complete, written language. The others are all visual languages, to varying degrees.
PCS7, Centum, 800xA, Experion PKS, and DeltaV are all Distributed Control Systems (DCS) offerings from the major players, these systems utilize the languages I mentioned to program entire process facilities. Think a multi billion dollar Exxon refinery, or Eli Lilly pharma facility.
Lots of heat and mass balances, physics, and other things to consider. That's the hard part. So they make the programming part tailored, user friendly, and restricted in functionality to some degree for obvious safety reasons. You can still do ANYTHING you want somewhere in the server stack (usually the MES) and pipe that behavior into the DCS. For example, state space model optimization on top of your matrix predictive model, which then drives setpoints for your loop controllers in the DCS. Etc.
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u/king_park_ 2h ago
My dad learned PLC programming for his engineering work. It took awhile to get him to understand how computer programming differed when I would talk to him about it.
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u/LightIsntFastEnough 5h ago
Don't wanna downvote, I will just put it here, disgusting choices both ways. No I don't use Fortran.
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u/TheFrenchSavage 41m ago
I don't recognize any of the left material.
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u/watduhdamhell 12m ago
Just Google "Industrial DCS"
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u/TheFrenchSavage 3m ago
Thank you!
Why wouldn't you use git tho? You don't need to version your microcontroller setups? You don't ever need to revert stuff?
Increasingly, and ironically, DCS are becoming centralised at plant level
Rare example of a wikipedia editor being strongly opinionated.
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u/Suspicious-Engineer7 6h ago
Really advancing the stereotype that programmers are sexist pigs. Good job
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u/shaka893P 6h ago
Doctors and nurses screaming in the background