We hope to see you at one of three CODESYS Users Conferences Opto 22 will be attending and exhibiting at in October.

You might recall one of our EPIC announcements earlier this year was adding more programming options to groov EPIC. One of those programming options is the CODESYS Development System to create IEC 61131-3 compliant control programs. You can choose among Ladder Diagram, Function Block Diagram, Structured Text, and Sequential Function Charts. And you can expand functionality even more using products from the CODESYS Store.

Whether you're new to CODESYS or have developed with it for a long time, the first annual CODESYS Users Conference North America is an event you won't want to miss. And Opto will be there.

Opto 22 recently returned to the annual ARC Industry Forum in Orlando, Florida with more EPIC news to share.

This year's ARC Forum event focused on "Driving Digital Transformation in Industries and Cities". Attendees had the opportunity to learn about new technologies, practices and standards to help with their business's digital transformation.

EPIC is more than just a name; it is an acronym describing the primary capabilities in the system. In this blog post, we’ll look more in depth at the P for programmability.

With today’s traditional PLC systems, you typically have one fixed development system with a limited set of tools. This is a burden that most engineers have had to suffer with. Oftentimes, you have to use inefficient workarounds to programmatically accomplish what is needed for different components of a given industrial automation application.

We appreciate our loyal OptoBlog subscribers and want you to be the first to hear about important product news. So, we're excited to announce on February 4, 2019 that the groov EPIC system will include IEC 61131-3 programming options.

Have you ever been stuck on a coding problem? Unsure of which tool to use for an application? Or if you have the functionality you need to get the job done? Maybe you’ve just got a new system and need a map to help you learn the new features and functionality.

As the "P" in EPIC implies, we've added more Programming options to groov EPIC.  Our goal is for this Controller to be truly EPIC, and give developers and engineers multiple programming options on an Edge device, in addition to PAC Control, C/C++, Python, and more that's already available.  So, it's time to get excited about the future of EPIC, and discuss how developers can now get creative by using an IEC-61131-3 tool set for their applications.

Many automation engineers are familiar with the IEC 61131-3 standard, though you might not know it by that name. If you use ladder logic, you may be using one of the languages the standard defines.

Developed by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), the standard defines the five accepted basic software architecture and programming languages of PLC control programming.

Of these five, one (Instruction List) has already been deprecated in the 3rd edition (61131-3). That leaves us with four languages, three graphical and one textual: