Earlier I talked about how you can do version control of your TwinCAT code with git. In this post, I want to show a very neat feature of git which I didn’t mention last time: pre-commits. You can use pre-commits to format, lint, or do static code analyses before you commit your code. Unfortunately, there is currently only one pre-commit for structured text files. But, we can also use pre-commits for markdown, html, or javascript files. Let’s dive in!
TwinCAT
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Recently a user on the LinkedIn TwinCAT forum shared and example how to use the RowClassesProvider. When I tried the example and went looking for the documentation, there was none to be found! On the whole internet, there is one (1!) example which sort of shows the function. In this post I will show what the RowClassesProvider does and how you can use it to dynamically color data grids.
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Over the years I’ve come across some features of TwinCAT or programming in general which can improve your code or your coding experience. Read on to level up your TwinCAT game in 2022!
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Units of values are very important, but also easy to screw up. The F# programming language found a nice solution to this problem. Because units are all over the place in an average PLC project, I started to think about how to replicate this behavior in TwinCAT. Eventually I found a method which gives compiler errors if the wrong units are used.
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When you’re developing PLC code it can be difficult to test the behavior of the whole code, due to all the disconnected in and outputs. A colleague of mine found a nice solution how you can create a digital twin of the real machine. The digital twin then simulates the behavior of the real one. In this article I’ll show you how you can do this with a simple oven project.
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Source control is an essential tool when you’re developing software. Yet, there is little information online on how to do it for TwinCAT projects. In this post, I’ll share some tips and tricks I picked up along the way. The main focus will be git, but many points apply to other source control systems as well.
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I was wondering if overloading functions in TwinCAT was possible, but I found out that this is not the case. I did however realize that overloading is possible using a few work-arounds. In this article I’ll show how to mimic this behavior with extended structs.
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The other day I answered a question on StackOverflow on how to unit test code from a separate project. To increase its exposure I also added it here.
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Recently I was coding up a new function block and passed another function block by reference to it. Somewhere I forgot to check if the reference was valid before using it and 💥 Page Fault! After some thinking I came up with a few solutions how this can be prevented and even how you could catch mistakes like this at compile time instead of during run time. Let me show you what I did.
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In an earlier article I introduced the PLC part of the TwinCAT EventLogger and showed some useful features. In this article, I will go into the details on how to visualize the events using TwinCAT’s web-based HMI (TE2000).
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Keeping track of all the things which are happening on your machine can be a daunting task. Whether it’s expected events or unexpected warnings and errors of which you want to inform the user. Luckily Beckhoff provides us with a tool which can help with that, namely the EventLogger. In this article I will introduce the PLC part of the EventLogger and show some useful features (code: PlcPart). A second article will show how to visualize the events using TwinCAT’s web-based HMI (TE2000) (code: HmiPart).
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In this article I want to highlight a useful and relatively new TwinCAT feature: Stand-alone PLC projects. As usual, Beckhoff’s InfoSys provides a good explanation on how to set-up and run such a project from scratch. However, there is relatively little information on why the separation might be a good idea, how to separate an existing project and some of the pitfalls you might encounter.