now, perhaps more than ever, other players in the market will give you the tools to work on their PLCs like B&R, Beckhoff.Īn even more interesting realization I had a while back is that everyone is jumping on the Ethernet bandwagon for fieldbuses not realising that they are taking down a barrier for replacement with other brands.īefore, you had a DH+ or controlnet field bus and changing the whole lot with whatever was the supported fieldbus from a manufacturer would add to cost and time to replace. you can’t get past the operator without a contractĪs far as I can remember you had to pay for programming tools for the big players. The days of automation manufacturers giving away software is long gone I meet lots of Siemens customers in the PLC world and I don't remember *ever* meeting one who didn't feel like Siemens had an underhand sneaky way of forcing money out of them. I still remember WinCC Flex SP3 *deleting* Protool off your computer without expressly saying that was going to happen. And that forces everyone else to also upgrade.
#SIMATIC NET PC SOFTWARE V13 SP UPGRADE#
then offered a chargeable upgrade to v11 as a massive upgrade then that's fine.Įspecially if you can choose to upgrade or not.īut the way Siemens do their upgrades is very underhand.
If they had released a fully working version of the software and added bits to it as v10.6 / v10.7 etc. Of course I understand that companies need to make money but it seems (as per my original post) that they have been charging their customers for software development.
#SIMATIC NET PC SOFTWARE V13 SP CODE#
V14 was almost a re-write of the code as I understand it. But I think that was because they were essentially different applications. You're correct though that it was a welcome surprise when they released v14 and gave a 'free' v13 license as well. I'm still a bit annoyed at Siemens releasing this as v10.5 which was woeful and then charging to upgrade to v11 and then again for v12 and then again for v13. If I have a project that can’t be converted, just open in that version. I can’t believe they are trying to make money.