Codesys Licence Question

Alvxx1
2017-05-31
2019-03-02
  • Alvxx1 - 2017-05-31

    Hi All,

    I've been playing with Codesys on the Raspberry Pi and am very interested in using it for some small projects involving Modbus TCP. A question I have is do I need to purchase a licence for each Pi that I own, or is it a single purchase multi-use licence?

    €50 is simply too much if its per Pi as I'd like to use 3 or 4 pi zero W's in my project, the licence would cost more than the Pi's themselves!

    Thanks

     
  • teichhei - 2017-06-01

    That's the sad part but you got that right. It used to be 30€ which I found a bit closer to "fair". Although even that is steep considering it has remarks like "not for production purposes". I believe in volume, really fair for student and non production use would be 15-20€ and sell heaps of licenses. 3S, you want people to learn and promote your platform, make the raspi license dirt cheap for non profit use so that every apprentice knows Codesys instead of TIA.

    Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk

     
  • Alvxx1 - 2017-06-01

    If I was going to pay for Codesys on each Pi, anything above 10€ is unreasonable really. It's been marketed as a learning/development tool when it comes to using it with Pi, so why the hefty price?

    I'll probably end up using Codesys anyway and just resetting everything every 2 hours, but that's not really great if I'm in the middle of a test. Fact of the matter is, if it works, I'd be purchasing PLCs that run Codesys for the final build. If I can't test it because of the limitations of licencing, I'll simply use a different PLC manufacturer that doesn't use Codesys and test a different way.

    Thansk for the info, just seems a bit greedy in my eyes!

     
  • teichhei - 2017-06-01

    [FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY] No you are not because it is still the cheapest option on the market with a proper IEC environment and the engineering tools are mostly free. For all the others you pay bucketloads fir Hardware and even more for the development environment.
    But I know what you mean and I think they would, as a whole, make more money. Not through direct sales but because of the level of familiarization and the resulting switch to Beckhoff, Wago etc...

    Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk

     
  • hermsen

    hermsen - 2017-06-04

    Techhei is correct, allthough I think that 50 eu for home use is actually very very cheap if you take in account;

    • supported types of protocols,
    • supported types of fieldbuses,
    • runtime patches & updates,
    • the personal support you can get if you need it,
    • further development on the hardware targets (multicore support for RPi i hope?).

    In that regard I think that 50 euro is not unreasonable at all!
    You try to buy a PLC this powerful and well suported for <100 euro and get this ammount of options and support... Good luck with that! Or just tell us where you found it

     
  • teichhei - 2017-06-04

    I still don't get the move from 30 to 50. In the end of the day it's a learning platform and not a PLC and that's nearly doubled in price. When you want to pair the Pi with some proper IO the options are very thin. Even at home if it needs to be reliable I would pick something commercial.
    But maybe you are right, the support is great and that needs to be paid somehow. Most likely there are also a lot more support questions compared to the commercial solutions because they usually call upon vendor support first.

    Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk

     
  • hermsen

    hermsen - 2017-06-05

    The choices are bound by your budget, not by the IO expendability of the Pi. The Pi has loads of IO expandbility, you just have to spend some money on it. Mind you, the platform costs only 40 euro's, so what do you expect? As far as stability of this platform itself goes, it is pretty reliable allthough it has no real time scheduling. If you want that, then switch to the Beaglebone or a vendor PLC.
    But I'd still would use the RPi in commercial applications if applicable. Janz Tec sells very nice Pi based industrial solutions with integrated local IO.

    Also, if you search for some decent and cheap IO expansion go here:
    <werbung>http://www.horter.de</werbung>. The expension cards are supported through an i^2c bus library (free) which is downloadable in the codesys store.

    Offcourse you can also use some other protocol, like ProfiNET or EtherCAt, but then you spend at minimum tenfold of money for the IO (>200 eu!).

     
  • juan356 - 2019-03-02

    It is a license you can use forever on several raspberries. but therefore you need a Security Key.
    https://store.codesys.com/codesys-secur ... mpakt.html
    Otherwise the license is device bound and cannot be transferred from one device to another.

     

Log in to post a comment.