Festo Didactic is a leader in both basic and advanced training in industry. Keeping the productivity of customer top of mind is achieved through continually adding new technologies to the list of subjects and by updating the courses available to the local market. Some of the latest courses from Didactic include robotics and the PLC programming software, CoDeSys.
“The use of robotics is increasing as more companies automate their production lines, from pick and place systems to high-speed applications,” explains Festo Didactic manager, Horst Weinert. “As global sponsors of the Worldskills disciplines, Mechatronics and Mobile Robotics, we have considerable experience in bringing this technology to students. The Worldskills competitions make use of the Festo Robotino, a mobile robot system that participants need to program in order to complete a number of set tasks; and the MPS Modular Production Systems, with stationery six-axis industrial robots. To support this technology locally, we decided to include robotics in our 2014 training portfolio.”
“Furthermore, with the growth of embedded and PC-controlled industrial automation applications, we believe that it is becoming increasingly important to teach different programming languages. We have therefore chosen to add a CoDeSys course to our range as this is tried and tested international software, independent of any specific hardware platform.”
CoDeSys is developed by 3S-Smart Software Solutions in Germany. It is a leading, hardware-independent, IEC 61131-3 development system under Microsoft Windows for programming and creating controller and HMI applications. The software is used across a number of industries and includes factory, process, energy and embedded automation amongst others. “The broad range of applications for this software, together with the fact that Festo PLCs are compatible, made it an obvious choice for us to include in our training offering,” says Weinert.
As part of the promotional activities around the CoDeSys course, each participant is given a free Festo CoDeSys PLC Starterkit, including power supply and software so that they can practise what they have learnt and grow confident in their skills.
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