Good to Know

Starting from V3.5 SP13, the CODESYS Development System offers additional possibilities for licensing workstations and devices by using the new license manager. By calling up the License Manager from the Tools menu, you can decide whether you want to license a workstation or a device. The next step offers you the possibility to use either a USB dongle or a soft container for licensing – regardless of whether you are licensing a workstation or a device. Furthermore, the new license manager also...

Access to single bits in variables with integer data type (SINT | INT | DINT | LINT | USINT | UINT | UDINT | ULINT | BYTE | WORD | DWORD | LWORD ). Use the following syntax:
<Variablennname>.<Bitnummer>
This allows you, for example, to retrieve bits from variables that have previously been encoded into them or to detect the +/- sign of an INT variable.

CODESYS Clip: Access to individual bits in numeric variables

You are working on a more complex automation project in CODESYS and have just created a new POU. If this POU is not free of syntactical errors, the entire project can no longer be compiled. Right-click on the POU to configure its properties and exclude it from compilation in the "Build" tab. The device is then displayed in a special color in the devices tree and your project can be compiled despite the syntactical errors in the POU.

If you want to instantiate and call a known function block (e.g. TON, CTU or motion POU) in a CFC editor, you only have to type in the name in the editor and press <Enter> three times.

Quick instantiation in CFC: Watch Clip »

In large CODESYS projects with many objects, it may be difficult to keep an overview in the device or POU tree.

Simply typing on the keyboard opens a search window and you can find the desired objects by entering parts of the name just like in internet search engines. Double-click on the location to jump directly to the desired POU.

The connection from the CODESYS Development System installed on a PC to the controller is established via the CODESYS Gateway Server, which is installed during setup. The Gateway Server service is started automatically. Typically, you can use the local gateway server on your own PC to connect to the available devices.

You can also connect to any gateway server via its IP address, for example if a device is connected to a remote PC via serial interfaces. In order to do this, simply add a new...

Press the ALT key and use the mouse to select columns in the declaration part or in text editors. Texts marked in this way can be deleted or edited in one go, e.g. by typing in new variable names.

If the project cannot be translated due to syntactic errors or if there are other messages in the message window, you can systematically process the list of messages by pressing F4. CODESYS immediately jumps to the place in the source code belonging to the message.