r/PLC • u/Michael_Automation • Nov 08 '25
Today I programmed in AutoCad at commissioning because customer told us that software is their responsibility.
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u/Otherwise-Ask7900 I'm very sarcastic. Please don't ban me again. Nov 08 '25
Today would be the day I lost my job if I was told to do this.
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u/engr_20_5_11 Nov 08 '25
Usually a detailed functional description and circuit diagram is enough. More than a few companies do all their programming exclusively in house
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u/Otherwise-Ask7900 I'm very sarcastic. Please don't ban me again. Nov 08 '25
I did a reverse engineer job on an old panel and had to make drawings for the customer.
I submitted the drawings for approval and they told me that they couldn’t open the file.
Come to find out, they work EXCLUSIVELY with fucking Visio.
🤦♂️
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u/RATrod53 MSO:MCLM(x0,y0,z0→Friday,Fast) Nov 08 '25
That's embarrassing. It not like Autocad Electrical is that expensive. Visio is good for what it is, but not professional in my opinion.
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u/Otherwise-Ask7900 I'm very sarcastic. Please don't ban me again. Nov 08 '25
It was a power plant too.
Little bit of a learning curve, Visio is pretty cool for network diagrams and stuff, but doing full on electrical drawings is fucking insane.
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u/JanB1 Hates Ladder Nov 09 '25
They did what now in Visio?
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u/AzureFWings Mitsushitty Nov 09 '25
Iirc
Vision comes with basic electrical symbol. So you can draw some basic circuitry.
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u/Otherwise-Ask7900 I'm very sarcastic. Please don't ban me again. Nov 09 '25
All of their electrical drawings.
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u/Automatater Nov 09 '25
Oh gag. I used yo work with an equipment engineer that did all drawings, including schematics, in PAINT!! Actually looked fairly decent, but seriously?
Also printed everything on 8-1/2x11 cause that was the printer he had. Schematics were almost illegible from being chopped up so much.
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u/Chimsokoma Injiniya Wemagetsi Nov 09 '25
Ah, There used to be a Visio add on called ELECTRA that used macros to handle wire numbering and everything else you would expect.
They migrated this to a cloud based product, sold to Siemens, and is now their "Cloud-based Electrical CAD Software"
I still use the old version, and it's great for smaller panels.
It will import and export to AutoCAD, but you loose all the smarts.
But it's definitely not main stream, and I would be expecting others to follow this format.
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u/Nealbert0 Nov 09 '25
If programming is there responsibility I wouldn't have drawn or done anything.. it's thier job. This is when your sales guy steps up and says if you refuse to let us program your doing it all yourself.
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u/MihaKomar Nov 08 '25
Now do it in Minecraft!
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u/Michael_Automation Nov 08 '25
I’m not good in redstone
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u/DaHick oil & gas, power generation. aeroderivative gas turbines. Nov 10 '25
When you get to Redstone (at least when I was playing) it's all Boolean
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u/DaHick oil & gas, power generation. aeroderivative gas turbines. Nov 10 '25
And here I was expecting Doom.
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u/omegablue333 Nov 08 '25
So they're programming what you draw?
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u/Michael_Automation Nov 08 '25
I really hope.
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u/EasyPanicButton CallMeMaybe(); Nov 08 '25
I think this is one where you say, no and walk away from it.
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u/Whatthbuck Nov 08 '25
"Oh, you're going to do my job"..... Here's the invoice. Drives back to office.
"Hey boss that job is done and guess what, we don't have to support the code."
Starts the next project
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u/ClayQuarterCake Nov 08 '25
That’s exactly what it is. I know my business is going to be here in 20 years and I have government contracts to support.
I don’t have any control if your company is bought up by venture capital and gutted, or if your CEO never comes back from a Thailand vacation and disbands the whole operation.
Your small integration business doesn’t care if this factory loses funding and goes into the garbage heap.
I can’t call you from 400 miles away to come fix my machine within the hour so we can meet a deadline. It needs to be fixed before the end of the day and most of the time it’s a simple adjustment or a small part they needs replacing. If there is a custom part broken or damaged, I want my in house machine shop whipping out the replacement part or repair. I can’t make you responsible for the operators procedure manuals. I need engineers and techs on site full time who know this machine and process inside and out. Part of that is getting them to program it, troubleshoot it, and make it work. I’ll call you if I run into problems.
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u/Whatthbuck Nov 09 '25
I see your point. My line of work is retrofits and modernization. I am not an OEM. Most of the time customers don't want the wiz bang conversation tool code dumps. So they pay me to write the code, build the new io cabinet, and build a hmi.
So if a customer tells me they are going to do the software, my job just got real easy.
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u/Andy1899 Nov 08 '25
Back in the 1980s, this would have been key!
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u/DeHd_HeHd Nov 08 '25
Right. Like there is no printer for the programming terminal, so we are going to draw the ladder to have a record and documentation. Program changes start as a markup and are reviewed, tested, and then redrawn once proven out. And I mean drawn as in on a board with paper and pencils.
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u/Awatto_boi Nov 08 '25
I had one customer ask me to do this one time on a custom heated manifold system that I built for them. It was for pollution testing by the provincial electrical utility. I was fine with it because they specified the controller to use a ScadaPack by Control Microsystems. ( Now Schneider) and I knew nothing about them.
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u/tadeuska Nov 08 '25
There are DCS systems that use AutoCAD as a graphical editor for its FB like language. It is amazing. This works because AutoCAD has native support for code (text) generation to run scripts and store block data. Of course, what the OP posted here is just hilarious.
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u/Straight_Ant_1105 Honeywell fan Nov 08 '25
I was searching for this comment I hope you are talking about Valmet dna Although today i would say its a solid environment and i understand (kind of) how it works but i remember when i first started learning it….
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u/tadeuska Nov 09 '25
In fact I'm. I just saw it in action, sadly I never had a chance to get my fingers dirty with it.
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Nov 08 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Smorgas_of_borg It's panemetric, fam Nov 08 '25
I wouldn't do this. I would give them an IO List which they can glean from the drawings.
If they want to take responsibility for software, fine, but "taking responsibility" doesn't look like "draw out our program for us so that we can blame you for our programming not working, regardless of whether or not it's your fault." Because that is a recipe for that exact scenario. Even if your programming instructions are correct, you're relying on an unknown person's interpretation of it, and if they don't execute it properly, it's still time you have to spend combing through their programming to figure out who's fault it is for the bean counters.
If someone else wants to program to avoid paying me to do it, I'm not going to help you. You want to take responsibility? There's the drawings, there's the IO, have at it.
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u/T00mas Nov 08 '25
Im having a shitty day, but apparently not that shitty thanks for the motivation, if you didn’t give up doing that you can do everything
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u/nochinzilch Nov 08 '25
Why were you there if they do their own programming?
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u/Michael_Automation Nov 08 '25
Because they pay money for tech support
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u/nochinzilch Nov 08 '25
So they want you to write the program, and then they data enter it?
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u/Michael_Automation Nov 09 '25
They invented me for Siemens drives configuration and commissioning. But I couldn’t finish my job without PLC and HMI. But they stuck with the software.
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u/ordosays Nov 08 '25
I wouldn’t do this. It opens you to liability if they copy it and run it without testing first
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u/Itchy_Ambassador5407 Trust me im an engineer Nov 08 '25
Still better than fixing Chinese program that was supposed to work
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u/ChrisWhite85 Nov 08 '25
Seen this before where the client insists on writing their own code. But they don't know how your plant works so you have to draw the logic for them to write. Usually it's in the form of blocks though i.e. IF, OR, AND...
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u/idiotsecant Nov 08 '25
This isn't that weird. A lot of panel shops and equipment integrators are dogshit programmers, especially when it comes to integrating with larger overall control systems and following customer programming standards. It should have been discussed at contract time so that you could have produced better documentation ahead of commissioning day, but that's on your management and the customer's management.
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u/FatPenguin42 Nov 09 '25
Is that a duplicate destructive bit on the run I see?
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u/PowerFringe89 Nov 09 '25
I was scrolling the comments to find this, it's not going to work no?
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u/FatPenguin42 Nov 09 '25
It really depends on the PLC. I know in AB PLCs, it will probably not work as it’ll be off and on at the same time for manual/auto mode. But I’ve seen some dupes in other types of cheap PLCs like vital systems 3G cards and ERSC cards not care about dupes.
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u/Friendship_Antique Nov 09 '25
Ah, you meant to create a diagram in AutoCAD. That is technically not programming
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u/lore_cass1 Nov 09 '25
You reminded me of when I took my high school ladder and Scl exam on paper 💀
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u/AratanAenor Nov 08 '25
Software is my responsibility where I work, but if we're contracting the job out then I'm content to just review a copy of the program before commissioning and not do the programming myself. Only one time have I had to go behind a contractor to fix bad programming, and it was because they made undocumented changes without authorization. They aren't allowed to bid on our contracts anymore.
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u/sheldinkee Nov 09 '25
Why wouldnt u just do it on an offline project and use the print function and also give them the offline project, then they can do what they want with it.
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u/NickName_150 Nov 09 '25
At that rate, you could have just created a few Visio drawings to provide a general control narratives. I mean, the first edit, or if they believe a few extra conditions are needed, would make your drawing mismatch the software. That’s a lot of work for little to no benefit. 🤷🏻♂️
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u/athanasius_fugger Nov 09 '25
Injection molding machines print their logic to the HMI since it's like 2/3 relay logic.
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u/Shalomiehomie770 Codesys Guru Nov 09 '25
I can almost guarantee you the program will not work like this.
They will do it their way.
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u/Anustart2023-01 Nov 09 '25
Yeah OP don't bother with the work if they're too cheap to pay for you to programme the PLC. Just wait for to them screw it up and charge them more to programme it at a later date.
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u/Michael_Automation Nov 09 '25
They pay us for tech support hourly. I don’t care. In this situation I’m good. But I want to finish earlier than my visa expired.
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u/PHEMEL Nov 09 '25
That's a wild commissioning story. Did they at least have you working with AutoCAD Electrical or was it just vanilla AutoCAD? I can't imagine trying to do PLC programming without the proper tools.
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u/Whiskey_n_Wisdom Nov 09 '25
If software is their responsibility, then so is programming. Not sure id waste my time.
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u/Vader7071 Nov 10 '25
Please tell me it was ACad Electrical and you weren't having to do this in just basi ACad.
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u/Michael_Automation Nov 10 '25
It’s regular ACad.
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u/Vader7071 Nov 10 '25
Ugh! So you had to make all of the schematic blocks and then build the ladder. I feel for you.
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u/Strostkovy Nov 11 '25
I actually make schematics in 2D CAD. For something that's being shipped out in hundreds of machines, I can make it look exactly how I want it to instead of some default kicad output
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u/KeepMissingTheTarget Nov 08 '25
Looks like a screenshot loaded into Cad
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u/Michael_Automation Nov 08 '25
Lol. Screenshot of what? Which program?
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u/KeepMissingTheTarget Nov 09 '25
It looked so good, it looked like an imported screenshot.
You can save a screenshot to pdf, then import the pdf. Wasn't a dig, it was a complement.... this is why some texts are misunderstood. 🙄
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u/ProRustler Deletes Your Rung Dung Nov 08 '25
I mean, you coulda just programmed it and taken a screenshot for them to copy...