Last year I had a project to upgrade the PLC of a machine to the newest generation. As usual the customer was not able to tell me the requirements they had. They told me to look in the old software…
It turns out it was 30+ years old software where you had to program in a cmd line (Siemens S5 if you know PLCs). I had to migrate everything to the next generation (S7) to be at least a little bit productive. Then I thought come on lets try to migrate to the current generation (TIA) to be even more productive.
At the end everything was nearly ready to be compiled and uploaded to the PLC. So I fixed some minor compile time issues, deleted around 50-75% of the old program (old stuff which went obsolete), changed some variable names, refactored some stuff and here we are: The same 30+ year old software is running strong. 24/7 since 6 months without issues 😁
This is so true!
Last year I had a project to upgrade the PLC of a machine to the newest generation. As usual the customer was not able to tell me the requirements they had. They told me to look in the old software…
It turns out it was 30+ years old software where you had to program in a cmd line (Siemens S5 if you know PLCs). I had to migrate everything to the next generation (S7) to be at least a little bit productive. Then I thought come on lets try to migrate to the current generation (TIA) to be even more productive.
At the end everything was nearly ready to be compiled and uploaded to the PLC. So I fixed some minor compile time issues, deleted around 50-75% of the old program (old stuff which went obsolete), changed some variable names, refactored some stuff and here we are: The same 30+ year old software is running strong. 24/7 since 6 months without issues 😁
Most projects written as a Demo, are still in production 3 years later. Still waiting for the “real” solution.
If you spend a lot of time thinking of future options, nobody will ever need them.
If you spend more time on the API with a partner, the partner will be replaced, probably before the solution is installed at all locations.