WOW – CoDeSys 3 Shocks Me!

I’m spending today in lovely and I mean lovely Lund Sweden. And I’m not just talking about the Swedish ladies though I have found no where in the world with this concentration of beautiful blonde women. If the world ever ran short, it could be resupplied from here, probably without much notice. They’re like ants at a labor day picnic.

I’m here today to take part in the 2nd annual Scandinavian CoDeSys conference. It’s an update for all the Scandinavian partners that are using CoDeSys in all sorts of applications.

Best Engineering is sponsoring the event. Best is the local supplier of CoDeSys programming services and application support. They help machine builders all over this part of the world develop applications. They’re a small company, just 3 or 4 Engineers but they have a real good handle on who’s doing what in Sweden, Norway and Finland.

I am really stunned by the advancements made in CoDeSys. They have added some significant advancements that are going to make KW, Isagraph and the rest get the willies. Here’s a summary of the new features in no particular order:

• Distributed Applications – This is ISAGraphs claim to fame and 3S is slowly chipping away at it. I am not sure that ISAgraph isn’t still the leader in distributed apps. It’s 64 system demo is pretty impressive but 3S is showing signs of catching up fast.
• Conditional Compilation – You can now not only use standard conditional compilation commands but they’ve added a ton of new Pragmas. You can use the new pragmas to check if a variable is defined, if it has a value, if it has a type and a whole lot more.
• Fieldbus Configuration – They’ve done a lot of work here to unify all their fieldbus interfaces. They now normalize everything to XML and store all the configuration files in a common place. In CoDeSys V2 they are distributed all over your hard drive.
• OPC Server – They’ve enhanced their OPC server offering. The same server can not connect to both CoDeSys V2 and V3 controllers. There is a demo available and I might be wrong, but I think it’s free. Imagine that!
• PLC Handler – The OPC server is now based on some technology they’ve developed called the PLC Handler. The PLC Handler is a generic way of moving data in and out of CoDeSys based controllers. Now, non windows devices have an easy way to integrate and talk to CoDeSys controllers.
• Soft Motion – 3S has done a great job of enhancing their soft motion offering in V3. It’s fully functional and contains a wealth of predefined function blocks that can be used in these sorts of applications.
• Object Oriented Programming (OOPs) – They’ve added support for OOP interfaces in CoDeSys and it is really going to be beneficial for those of us who’ve grown up on true Object Oriented Programming.

There’s a lot more, like the ability to convert between different programming languages, between Function Block Programming and Ladder without compiling. The demo was really cool. And there is even more coming! Dimitri Phillipe,m the 3S International Sales Manager, wrapped up the day with a preview of the future and I can tell you that it’s pretty exciting.

For more information on CyDeSys, check out our blog or give me call. I’d be happy to talk to you about it.