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Comment by cashsterling | Hacker News Reader

For what it is worth... you can buy industrial PC/PLC from Beckhoff with FreeBSD installed. PLC= programmable logic controller. Run control system logic on the PLC hard-realtime runtime and run your sophisticated logic and numerical stuff on the FreeBSD OS... soft-realtime communication between FreeBSD and the PLC runtime is pretty straight forward. https://www.beckhoff.com https://www.beckhoff.com/en-us/products/ipc/software-and-too...

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Industrial PC, not PLC. FreeBSD is replacing WinCE there.

I was looking forward to such a PLC, but it's still interesting.

Cool!

Maybe we are arguing semantics here... but read up about the Beckhoff TwinCAT system and how it works. I would say Beckhoff systems are both an IPC and a PLC in one.

Beckhoff system run two OS'es... the PLC runtime is hard real-time and runs at the chipset level (so even if the windows or freeBSD crashes the PLC still runs). You program the PLC using IEC-61131 languages (structured text which sort of between BASIC and Pascal, ladder logic, sequential function chart, cyclical function chart, etc.) and also have the option to run C/C++ code (with no dynamic memory allocation).

For what it is worth, newer Omron PLC's run PLC code on top of QNX, B&R automation uses a very similar approach to Beckhoff.

Overall, the B&R and Beckhoff PLC's are, I think, under-appreciated.

Thank you, that's very interesting (and it wasn't obvious to me from the web site). Especially that Omron uses QNX, that's even cooler.

There was a webinar on TwinCat/FreeBSD: https://www.beckhoff.com/en-en/support/webinars/webinar-deta...

The Embedded Windows version didn't have that web console. Also, ZFS copy-on-write snapshots could be quite useful for quick backup/restorement when working on-site.

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