Embedded systemsNew products at embedded world 2018
From February 27 to March 1, 2018, the Nuremberg exhibition halls made room for everything to do with embedded systems technology. Computer&AUTOMATION presents a selection of new products that were on show at the stands of the 16th embedded world.
Manufacturers of automation devices can now offer their customers the functionality to manually distribute the various tasks of the PLC application to symmetrical processor cores of the control CPU in Codesys. Parallel processing increases the execution speed while at the same time utilizing the available processor power - and the user retains control over the timing. Although controllers with operating systems such as Linux or Windows carry out such distribution themselves, the resulting time behavior is difficult to estimate in individual cases. To use the multicore implementation implemented in Codesys, in the simplest case the user simply assigns the desired CPU core to task groups of his PLC application. Available coding guidelines help with more complex configurations. At the same time, the problem of data consistency in data storage or access is solved by appropriate software in the control runtime system, for example to prevent frequent blockages by multiple readers/single writers or to enable atomic access to data types up to 64 bits. With multicore support, complex PLC logic, for example, can be divided into various independent task groups and CPU cores. In addition, the logic application can be separated from the communication and additional functions such as motion, CNC or visualization.