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?
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
6
u/horizon_games 13h ago
No one loves Siemens S7