<story><title>Arduino unveils the Opta – “Micro PLC” for industrial IoT</title><url>https://www.hackster.io/news/arduino-unveils-the-opta-its-first-micro-plc-for-the-industrial-internet-of-things-d97f1d6b868a</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DannyBee</author><text>I do a &lt;i&gt;lot&lt;/i&gt; of PLC work.&lt;p&gt;The Arduino IDE is totally unsuitable for it. No idea what they are doing about this.  It would take an amazing amount of work to fix this.&lt;p&gt;As for PLC functionality people actually use, the product page says &amp;quot;Optional support for standard IEC 61131-3 PLC languages&amp;quot;. This is what folks use for real. I presume this means &amp;quot;we didn&amp;#x27;t want to pay CodeSys but you can&amp;quot;. Or something.
That sucks.&lt;p&gt;Maybe they are relying on MBed support as their basic realtime story but, as mentioned, their dev environment is unsuitable for this kind of work.&lt;p&gt;There is no mention of expected scan time for ladders or guaranteed latency for anything else&lt;p&gt;So for the intended market, this doesn&amp;#x27;t look interesting so far. It seems like it will go the way of the x8 and land with a huge thud.&lt;p&gt;For a random person wanting an Arduino in a cabinet on a din rail, I can see maybe they&amp;#x27;d use it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dfox</author><text>My experience from integrating various automation systems (typically large-ish roller conveyor systems) is that often IEC 61131 languages are actually detrimental to productivity of the PLC programmers. It is this weird turing tarpit where anything that can be expressed as ladder logic is simple and point an click (modulo the horrible UI&amp;#x2F;UX of every single PLC IDE) but anything more complex than that is huge pain because you are constantly fighting against the dumbed-down programming model and constantly reimplementing simple algorithms that are part of standard library in essentially any other programming ecosystem. And that is just for the control of moderately complex process (eg. tracking positions of unit loads on the conveyor), any kind of communication with external world (which tends to be event based) is horrible mess in order for it to fit into the cycle based model (and the argument that it gives you predictable and consistent latency is pure hogwash, the cycle time jitter caused by branching and other threads running on the PLC&amp;#x27;s CPU tends to be huge, at least on S7-300&amp;#x2F;1200&amp;#x2F;1500).</text></comment>
<story><title>Arduino unveils the Opta – “Micro PLC” for industrial IoT</title><url>https://www.hackster.io/news/arduino-unveils-the-opta-its-first-micro-plc-for-the-industrial-internet-of-things-d97f1d6b868a</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DannyBee</author><text>I do a &lt;i&gt;lot&lt;/i&gt; of PLC work.&lt;p&gt;The Arduino IDE is totally unsuitable for it. No idea what they are doing about this.  It would take an amazing amount of work to fix this.&lt;p&gt;As for PLC functionality people actually use, the product page says &amp;quot;Optional support for standard IEC 61131-3 PLC languages&amp;quot;. This is what folks use for real. I presume this means &amp;quot;we didn&amp;#x27;t want to pay CodeSys but you can&amp;quot;. Or something.
That sucks.&lt;p&gt;Maybe they are relying on MBed support as their basic realtime story but, as mentioned, their dev environment is unsuitable for this kind of work.&lt;p&gt;There is no mention of expected scan time for ladders or guaranteed latency for anything else&lt;p&gt;So for the intended market, this doesn&amp;#x27;t look interesting so far. It seems like it will go the way of the x8 and land with a huge thud.&lt;p&gt;For a random person wanting an Arduino in a cabinet on a din rail, I can see maybe they&amp;#x27;d use it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>numlock86</author><text>The target audience is &amp;quot;industry&amp;#x2F;professional IoT&amp;quot;. I guess this is mainly targeted at prototyping projects or hooking something existing up to the web with some &amp;quot;realtime&amp;quot; I&amp;#x2F;Os, giving people the opportunity to stick to 61131. Existing solutions that offer you BLE&amp;#x2F;WiFi in this sector are usually terrible and just branded routers with &amp;quot;industrial grade&amp;quot; components. This is probably not suited for or targeted at automating your next big high-runner molding machine or high-speed motion-controlled application, as you already figured out.</text></comment>