Over the past year I’ve been working on a TwinCAT 3 Tutorial, and with the posting of the 13th chapter about the TwinCAT 3 Scope View, I’m considering it “complete.” I’ve covered all the major topics that I wanted to cover.

Writing a tutorial like this was actually a learning experience for myself. Before I made any statement about the software I tried to validate my assumptions first, and many times I learned that I had preconceived notions about how it worked which may not have been completely accurate. If you’re a TwinCAT 3 programmer, then you need to know your tool set inside and out. If you’re not sure how something works, it’s best to setup a quick test and try it out. That’s one of the advantages of PC-based software: if you want to run a test, your office PC is a laboratory environment. Write some code and run it.

Thank you to everyone who offered feedback on the existing sections, and to those of you who kept pushing me to continue writing more. I sincerely hope this can be that missing link to take people from the world of traditional PLCs into the more interesting and ultimately more powerful world of PC-based control.

It looks like TwinCAT 3 has a viable future ahead of it. Interest seems to be growing over time (according to Google Trends, anyway):

That makes TwinCAT 3 a valuable skill to learn if you’re an integrator, and an interesting technology to investigate for existing plants.