Re: Git with Lader logic

On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 2:53 PM, Randall S. Becker
[off-list ref] wrote:

On March 17, 2015 7:34 PM, Bharat Suvarna wrote:

quoted

I am trying to find a way of using version control on PLC programmers like

Allen

quoted

Bradley PLC. I can't find a way of this.

Could you please give me an idea if it will work with Plc programs. Which

are

quoted

basically Ladder logic.

Many PLC programs either store their project code in XML, L5K or L5X (for
example), TXT, CSV, or some other text format or can import and export to
text forms. If you have a directory structure that represents your project,
and the file formats have reasonable line separators so that diffs can be
done easily, git very likely would work out for you. You do not have to have
the local .git repository in the same directory as your working area if your
tool has issues with that or .gitignore. You may want to use a GUI client to
manage your local repository and handle the commit/push/pull/merge/rebase
functions as I expect whatever PLC system you are using does not have git
built-in.

To store binary PLC data natively, which some tools use, I expect that those
who are better at git-conjuring than I, could provide guidance on how to
automate binary diffs for your tool's particular file format.

The one thing I find interesting about RSLogix in general (caveat: I
only have very limited experience with RSLogix 500 / 5000; if I do
anything nowadays, it's in the micro series using RSLogix Micro
Starter Lite)... they do have some limited notion of version control
inside the application itself, though it seems rudimentary to me.
This could prove to be helpful or extremely annoying, since even when
I connect to a PLC and go online, just to reset the RTC, it still
prompts me to save again (even though nothing changed, other than the
processor state).

You may also find this link on stackexchange helpful:
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/102487/are-there-realistic-useful-solutions-for-source-control-for-ladder-logic-program

As Randall noted, L5K is just text, and RSLogix 5000 uses it,
according to this post.  It may work okay.

--Doug