Python in Process Control?

[Andrea Griffini]

On Sat, 02 Oct 2004 11:50:25 +0200, Armin Steinhoff
<a-steinhoff at web.de> wrote:

>> ...does really noone use Python for industrial control applications?

I implemented the control software for an automated
tangential sewing machine in python (it's a 4 axis
control). The low-level part for axis control runs
on custom hardware, but all the high-level part
including path computation with dynamics constraint
has been coded for a PC in pure python that happened
to be fast enough. The program uses a serial port
and a parallel port to communicate with the low-level
part of the NC, and the user interface has been
coded to work fullscreen using pygame.

It was just a prototype I coded that way basically to
test python, but I was surprised with the results
that seem to me more than adequate. In my case I had
just soft realtime constraint (the low-level part is
able to stop and restart gracefully in the event of
buffering underflow in the axis control data feed)
but I didn't observe any real problem (the axis are
controlled with dt = 1ms).

Andrea