Phoenixville, PA -- (SBWIRE) -- 08/17/2010 -- Googling the phrase “.NET PLC driver” lead United Sortation Solutions, Director of Engineering, Jeff Zerr to www.ingeardrivers.com. According to Zerr the challenges United Sortation Solutions faced included, “Exchanging a wide variety of information between an Allen-Bradley Control Logix PLC and a custom PC application. Along with that, we needed to minimize communication delays, as well as development time.”
Before selecting INGEAR Zerr looked at alternatives, noting, “We looked at basic TCP messaging, as well as having the PLC communicate directly with our SQL database. We also looked at INGEAR competitors and OPC servers.” He went on to say, “It’s always helpful to have a trial version so we can test it out. During the pre-sales phase, everyone at INGEAR was very helpful, including extending my initial trial license. But the most important thing for us from a technical point of view is having direct access to the PLC tags. It’s very fast and flexible. It’s almost like being on the same backplane as the PLC with dual port ram access.”
The company used both ActiveX Studio 6.0 and NET.LOGIX 2.0. In both cases, the firm developed code using the trial license as part of the test. All the while, other options and competing products were consider, but consistently found INGEAR to offer the best value – including features, price, documentation and support.
Real cost-savings were realized. “The Ingear product allows us to have all of the technical features we need, most notably fast and flexible data exchange. While at the same time, we can quickly configure a custom system and shorten our development cycle,” praised Zerr.
The INGEAR.NET software from CimQuest is a set of runtime free class libraries that simplify building, developing, and deploying connected systems for manufacturing applications using Visual Basic or Visual Studio .NET. It uses only three primary classes of .NET code:
- one of which manages the PLC,
- one manages the data that are read from or written to that PLC,
- one manages groupings of methods, properties, and events to optimize read/write operations on a collection.
It includes a direct Ethernet communication channel to the PLCs enabling developers to write HMI interfaces to PLC controls or acquiring data from them. No additional third-party components, drivers, APIs or tools, such as OPC Servers, are required. This simple programming model by CimQuest InGear contributes to faster response times and ease of use and ultimately – profitability.
CimQuest INGEAR
http://www.ingeardrivers.com
Chuck Karwoski
plc.net@ingeardrivers.com
Toll Free: 1.866.935.7979 | Telephone: 1.610.935.8282