ACC Automation: PLC & Industrial Control Learning
Practical Tips and Techniques
One week ago, the free PLC simulator at accautomation.ca had 17 ladder instructions. Today it has 42. Between October 13 and October 16, the ACC PLC Simulator shipped six releases, v1.123 through v1.128, in four days. You can now change a program while it is running, step a traffic intersection with one drum instruction, pick … Read more
Until now, the ACC PLC Simulator ran one 3D scene at a time. You could program a motor starter, a conveyor, or a tank—but only one at a time— and the moment you connected a second scene, it fought the first for the same inputs. From version 1.121, that limit is gone. The multi-scene PLC … Read more
I Replaced a $5,000 PLC Trainer with a Free PLC Training Simulator. A PLC training panel costs between three and eight thousand dollars. Technical colleges buy racks of them. Self-learners look at the price and walk away. Companies send employees to week-long courses at two thousand dollars per seat. I built a free PLC training … Read more
Can AI Program a PLC? I Tested AI-Generated PLC Code Live. I gave an AI assistant one task: write a complete conveyor control program in Structured Text for the ACC PLC Simulator. Start the motor, detect the box at each end with proximity sensors, reverse direction, auto-stop, and handle a restart. Then I pasted the … Read more
Structured Text is widely recognized as the fastest-growing PLC programming language. It is an IEC 61131-3 standard text-based language that reads like Pascal or C. If you have worked with any high-level programming language, ST will feel familiar. And if you have only used ladder logic, ST opens up a new way to think about … Read more
AI PLC code is everywhere in the conversation right now, but does it actually work on a real machine? Instead of guessing, I set a trap. I gave both ChatGPT and Claude the exact same motor control task for the CLICK PLC — a task with a classic wiring gotcha buried in it — took … Read more
This PLC programming software article was written by Chris Urban, an automation educator and PLC trainer with over 40 years of hands-on experience. Find Chris on YouTube and LinkedIn. — CU Please allow me to start with a quote from Robert A. Pease: “My favorite programming language is solder.” Among the mistakes I made when I was younger, I chose … Read more
Using AI to program a Click PLC. In this post, I will show you how I use AI to help me program an AutomationDirect CLICK PLC. We will describe a simple machine in plain English, let the AI turn that description into a ladder logic plan and an address list, and then enter that logic … Read more
This article on PLC programming languages was written by Chris Urban, an automation educator and PLC trainer with over 40 years of hands-on experience. Find Chris on YouTube and LinkedIn. — CU Can we even compare the programming languages used on our PCs to those used in PLC programming? To get to the bottom of this, we have … Read more
I’ve been around PLCs for a long time now, and I’ve watched a lot of people take their first run at programming one. PLC programming challenges affect everyone. Some come from an electrical background, some from IT, some from the maintenance shop floor, and some are students who have never wired a pushbutton in their … Read more