PLC Source management

[mmagnani711]

Hi to everybody, in the last times I'm considering to introduce in the PLC Group where I work, an automatic system that can introduce rights of access and manage history of the changes and versioning of the PLCs sources written and modified by all us PLC developers. Currently, these operations are performed in a "manual" manner : the developer that need to access a PLC source version, resident on a Server and accessible from the Intranet, opens it in his local PC developement environment (for example OMRON CX-Programmer). On his local PC he can perform changes and all operations he needs... These operations are all done without being able to check if others developers have already accessed the same resources (and maybe they've already performed changes !!!), without safety criterions... the classical situation is to shout between rooms of the technical office "Someone Already Has Opened The Version XXX For The Machine YYY ?!?!?!". Also we don't have a professional system of versioning and source, this kind of job is managed only changing names of the files to every increase of version and a couple of Word/Excel documents that reports interventions done in the time by every of us... Seeking on Internet about environments of this type, that I have noticed are classified with the acronym SCM-Source Control Managers, I have found some products (Vault, SourceSafe, CVS or the Microsoft Visual Studio Team System) but all of them seem to be strongly directed to the planning through high-level languages (and file type text), C++, Pascal, Basic, etc., rather than binary file what generally are PLC sources. I ask you therefore if someone knows, and even has also experimented, systems of this kind. Thanks to all for the attention and for the possible answers. Mirko.

[jstolaruk]

In the past, I've supplied these types of s/w products to customers for Allen Bradley PLC's (I don't know about Omron). The s/w automatically uploaded the PLC memory and archived it accordingly. Its been long enough that I'm not sure who the suppliers are of this anymore but I know they exist. Your best bet will be to contact the your local distributor for each mfg of PLC you are looking to support and hopefully they would know or put the request in to the PLC mfg for a recommendation. If your are just interested in the version control software, I have used these in the past and IMHO are absolutely necessary in large projects. They are great for tracking s/w changes by teams. BTW, in every one I used there was an option to archive and track binary files too. The last one I used was by Microsoft and previously it was PVCS (its changed owners since).

[TERdON]

Subversion is the "succesor" of CVS. It should have better binary file compability then CVS. Did you check it out?

[BobLfoot]

We use autosave in an AB environment and it works well. Still can cancel out of the save or backdoor edit at the machine and not check files out thru save. Brings me to my next point. Any source control scheme is only as good as the honor of those using it.

[mmagnani711]

No Terdon, actually I've started my evaluation looking at CVSNT as Server manager and TortuoiseCVS as client... I'll report my impressions as soon as I can. I'll certainly look at the binary comparison feature...

[TERdON]

Please report back then. I haven't tried it myself, all I really know is they are making it to be "a better CVS" and I don't really know more than it exists... :)