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by theduemmer 1596 days ago
Rockwell Automation's Factory Talk software. It is used for developing GUIs for screens on industrial machines. Horribly expensive, laggy and broken. Versioning is a nightmare with crappy backwards compatibility (if it even decides to open the old project at all without crashing or locking up). God help you if it decides it doesn't want to deploy the screen programs over the network because then it becomes a song and dance to get it working over a USB key. Don't let windows update either as it seems like updates constantly break it. Sometimes it breaks itself and more often than not their (very expensive) support says to nuke everything and reinstall.

There are alternatives, some worse but most better and cheaper. But Rockwell is the industry standard in North America. So their screens get spec'd.
5 comments
airbreather 1595 days ago
Rockwell has been pushing out superflakey software that I have encountered going back 25+ years. Starting with "pyramid integrators" back in the early 90's, daily updates to the software from the US overnight, generally three steps backwards and one forwards, if you were lucky.

On the other hand, I did a project with Schneider Unity Pro, similar PLC prog type software and it only crashed once in a whole year, and I blame windows for that crash.

Rockwell, if you go a day wihout a crash, then you start to feel like checking your files to check it hasnt corrupted some shit on the down low.

In more recent times GE royally screwed the pooch with the prog software for their new PAC range.

I don't understand how one or two automation companies can get it so right, and others so wrong.

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daybyday 1594 days ago
Hey, I'm a software test engineer in Factory Talk. Let me see if I can act on your feedback, can we chat? You can find my email address in my profile. Cheers
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comprev 1595 days ago
Siemens software was also notoriously flakey and required patching workstations to involve a shamanistic ritual to improve the success rate.
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joslk 1595 days ago
automation industry is horrible. but there's beckhoff with open protocol, integration to visual studio, few open source projects and growing community... i even work for inxton.com where we developed ST to C# transpiler - makes it easy to do high level stuff.

it still sucks, but other solutions suck even more

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vidanay 1596 days ago
I'll add "everything B&R" to this.
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