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Pain points in business: what people struggle with
Search the problems to solve, as people described them on Reddit and other platforms, in their own words.
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PLC Code Lifecycle Chaos
PLC and HMI programs lack version control, testing, portability, and documentation, causing rework, downtime, and fragile migrations.
In their words
I can not find a single report or person that really used these PLC’s which made me hesitant
Researchers are not allowed to install 3rd party software on their machines - that rules out SCADA software and VPN/VNC installations to access plant controls and logged data.
I started asking the PLC/controls guy to see the top level control system architecture... he never commits a concept for review.
We have 8 main controllers with several auxiliary controllers with millions of variables. Iba is able to log a portion of these for us.
We've been doing it all manual for years... I'm looking at both copia and octoplant... But they are not cheap!
Most of these software solutions are way too rigid. Then those that are super flexible like Tulip end up being not very powerful
do engineers still end up going back to the issued PDFs, old revisions, field information, etc. just to verify that the database is actually correct?
you have to put in some work to get stuff like all the specific protocols in that sector (like 61850) to run
As of now these welders are backing these up using USB drives but want automated backups (for obvious reasons)
I spend half my life on commission sites fixing absolute garbage code left by juniors or rushed contractors.
We wait till the machine breaks due to old controls. Then we ask the operator how it used to work.
I occasionally get spec sheets for a device that list 0.1" increments with the comparable metric increments. Implementation get a bit annoying dealing with that within our PLC programs
agents which quickly hallucinate capabilities of the SCADA or PLC hardware and write out code that fundamentally won't work
I noticed he grabbed a backup from ANOTHER customer and I immediately had to intervene.
PLC and controls engineers
Where they talk
- r/PLC
- r/IndustrialAutomation
- r/SCADA
- r/IndustrialMaintenance
- r/industrialengineering
- r/ControlTheory
- r/fiberopticss
- r/automation
Tools they use today
- TIA Portal
- Codesys
- Ignition
- Studio 5000
- Beckhoff
- RSLogix 5000
- Siemens S7-1500
- ControlLogix
Why those fall short
- passwords are shared, so protection is ineffective
- vendor could not sort it out over the phone
- Some PLCs lack built-in closed-loop features, forcing custom development
- no enforcement, descriptions missing, typos look correct, hard to find I/O on drawings
- Project Server not great; SVN hell to keep consistent during commissioning and ad-hoc service
Map of ideas
Drawing the map…