For 4diac FORTE, API stability was always our major concern. However, this came at a cost (e.g., performance, memory usage, memory-safety). Therefore, we decided that we need to do a major rework of 4diac FORTE for the next release!
The first results are already looking very promising. We get twice the speed for FB algorithm execution and reduced the runtime overhead (event and connection processing) by 30%. We hope for more progress to come in the next weeks.
What does that mean for you?
- For Basic, Simple, and Composite FBs; Adapter Interfaces; and Structured Data types: you simply need to regenerate the C++ code from within your IDE.
- For SIFBs: you need to regenerate the interface handling code and adjust the method signature of the executeEvent method
Given the gains that you will get from this rework, we believe that this is a small price to pay. If you have any questions regarding this change, do not hesitate to contact us!
Cheers,
The Eclipse 4diac Team
Age: 22 daysDear 4diac community,
Every year, Google provides funds to students and beginners of open source to learn about contributing to open source projects. We are pleased that two of the proposals submitted for Eclipse 4diac were accepted. The projects allow students to concentrate on open source contributions during their summer break, and provide a unique opportunity for projects like Eclipse 4diac to develop prototypes for new features.
- Andrea, a second-year computer science student, will work on improving the quality of the IDE.
- Paul was already a participant of the program in 2022. This year, he will work on providing tools for developers of IEC 61499 applications to ensure their correctness.
Two of our committers will serve as mentors for our students. Many thanks to Bianca and Michael for introducing Andrea and Paul to our community and providing support.
Please welcome our contributors for 2023!
Cheers,
The Eclipse 4diac Team
Dear 4diac community,
Two of our team members conducted usability studies over the past years on our automation solution development tool, the 4diac IDE. We're proud to announce that the results of these studies have been published in a well-regarded scientific journal, and we believe they will help us make the 4diac IDE even better.
As many of you know, developing industrial control software is a challenging task, especially when control systems are unique and need to be maintained for many years. That's why we put a lot of effort into making the 4diac IDE a more intuitive and efficient environment for creating automation solutions.
Our research paper discusses the results of two usability studies we conducted to evaluate the 4diac IDE. We used the cognitive dimensions of notations framework from the field of human-computer interaction to assess the tool's capabilities, and we also conducted a user study with ten industrial automation engineers who used the 4diac IDE in a realistic control software maintenance scenario.
Based on the lessons we learned from these studies, we were able to make improvements to the 4diac IDE that we believe will make it an even better tool for developing industrial control software. We encourage you to read our publication here to learn more about our research and the changes we've made to the 4diac IDE.
We're committed to providing our users with the most usable and efficient environment for creating automation solutions. Thank you for being a part of the Eclipse 4diac community, and keep an eye out for more updates on our ongoing efforts to improve the 4diac IDE!
As always, we value feedback from our community and users. If you have any comments or suggestions regarding 4diac IDE or the usability studies mentioned in this news post, we would love to hear from you. You can provide your feedback on our dedicated feedback page, located at LimeSurvey. Your input will help us to further improve the Eclipse 4diac IDE and make it an even better tool for industrial control software development.
Cheers,
The Eclipse 4diac Team
Dear 4diac community,
Our team is actively working on the upcoming release, and we're excited to share some updates on our progress. We're putting a lot of effort into ensuring that the new release meets our users' expectations, and we're working hard to deliver new features and enhancements that will make automation solution development even more efficient and intuitive.
The last version of the 4diac IDE already supported error markers, making it easier to work with inconsistencies in your projects.
The addition of error markers is a significant usability improvement, providing a clear indication of where errors exist in your code. This feature allows users to load broken projects, make changes, and fix errors later. This is a welcome enhancement for users who have been frustrated with the inability to work with inconsistent projects. The feature will make it easier to identify and address errors in the code, streamlining the process of creating automation solutions.
In earlier versions of Eclipse 4diac, certain operations were prohibited because they could potentially lead to errors. However, with the new update, these operations are now allowed, and any resulting errors can be easily handled using the error markers feature.
Michael, the developer who implemented this feature, says that "The implementation of the error markers feature in Eclipse 4diac required a novel approach that involves refactoring features for resolving the errors seamlessly. When loading projects, we scan the project's XML code in real-time, identify errors, and highlight them in the source code editor. We spent a considerable amount of time testing the feature to ensure that it works seamlessly with the rest of the IDE."
If you're interested in learning more about the error markers feature in the 4diac IDE, we encourage you to check out Michael's publication where he discusses the feature and its implementation in more detail. You can find the link to the paper here. Happy reading!
Cheers,
The Eclipse 4diac Team
In the beginning of 4diac IDE, we introduced Virtual DNS as a means to easily collect configuration values for IOs and communication FBs. It was a simple key-value store that greatly reduced the effort. But it was never more than that and had its problems (e.g., editing Virtual DNS in a view is a pain).
In the last months, as part of the work on improving our IEC 61131-3 structured text support, we added a new feature: a file format for providing a set of globally available constants. This feature is now in a state where it can replace the Virtual DNS. Therefore, we will start the process of removing Virtual DNS from the development branch of 4diac IDE. With the next release it will not be available any more.
If you want to try out our new global constants feature get 4diac IDE's latest RC build.
There, you can simply create a file with the extension globalconsts and open it in the default editor. In this editor, you can specify your constants textually:
VAR_GLOBAL CONSTANT
PI : REAL := 3.1415;
PI_HALF : REAL := PI / 2.0;
TWO_PI : REAL := PI * 2.0;
END_VAR
You can use the constants in any place in 4diac IDE where literals of the specified type are allowed (e.g., a pin of an FB). The great advantage of the global constants is that they are typed. With that, we can provide feedback whether the constant is allowed at the place you are using it. Also, code completion is possible.
Looking forward to your feedback.
Cheers,
The Eclipse 4diac Team
Dear 4diac community,
It's always good to see passionate individuals join open source projects like Eclipse 4diac. As a new committer of Eclipse 4diac, Michael will now have the ability to directly contribute to the development of the project and help guide its future direction. It's also great that he's enthusiastic about supporting the community - open source projects thrive on the support and contributions of their users. We are sure Michael's contributions will be greatly appreciated by the Eclipse 4diac community.
Cheers,
The Eclipse 4diac Team
Dear 4diac community,
We know that it has been a while since our last release, but we want to let you know that we have been busy making a lot of changes behind the scenes. We plan to release a new version later this year, packed with a wide range of new features and improvements. We believe that you, our valued community, might not be aware of all the changes that have happened since then. To address this, we will be providing regular updates on our recent progress via our news page and social media. Our next release will include all the features that we have been working on, so stay tuned for more information.
In addition to our upcoming release, we would also like to showcase research works that use or improve Eclipse 4diac. If you have been working on a project that involves Eclipse 4diac and would like us to consider featuring it, please send it with a short description of how Eclipse 4diac was affected or how it helped your work, depending on the nature of the project. We value community contributions and are always looking for ways to improve the 4diac ecosystem.
If you have any suggestions for future updates or would like to share how you've used 4diac IDE in your work, please reach out to us through our mailing list or social media channels. We can't wait to hear from you!
Cheers,
The Eclipse 4diac Team
Eclipse 4diac was already featured at previous the ARC Industry Forums. But this year Eclipse 4diac developers and user will be there to show how they use and how Eclipse 4diac can help you.
If you are there, attend the Industrial Open Source Software Session on Wendesday Feb 8th to see as live! This is not only great for Eclipse 4diac but is in general a great message for Open Source Software for Industrial use.
Cheers,
The Eclipse 4diac Team
Age: 184 daysOn popular demand we are very happy to announce the first virtual Eclipse 4diac Community Meeeting. This community meeting is intended as a place for the Eclipse 4diac community to get to know each other and the exchange ideas around Eclipse 4diac.
The 1st Eclipse 4diac Virtual Community Meeting will be held on December 13th, 5pm CET.
You can join the Meeting via Zoom: Zoom Meeting Link
Our planned agenda is as follows:
- Introduction of the attendees
- Overview on Eclipse 4diac and the planned next steps
- Community Q&A
we use a publicly available document to manage the meeting’s agenda. You can add items to it anytime.
We look forward to talking with you all.
Cheers,
The Eclipse 4diac Team
Eclipse 4diac was featurd twice in the last two month in the german pod cast "Open Source in der Industrie":
- Interview with our project leader Alois Zoitl: The Holy Grail
- Discussion and retrospective of the SPS 2022 trade fair: The PLC of the Russians
Many thanks to Dr. Julian Feinauer und Robert Weber for this opportunity.
Cheers,
The Eclipse 4diac Team
It is hard to believe that 15 years have passed since on July 7th, 2007 the first public 4diac version was presented by Thomas Strasser and Alois Zoitl at the IEEE IES International Conference on Industrial Informatics.
In these 15 years, the development of Eclipse 4diac had its ups and downs - but nowadays it is used by universities and research institutions all over the globe.
And, increasingly, even companies are using or investigating 4diac for their use cases.
Martin Melik-Merkumians (ACIN, TU Wien), a long time Eclipse 4diac committer, summarizes our history:
Being part of the team since 2009, I (well, probably all of us) had the high hopes to make a significant impact to the automation industry and its users with 4diac.
Although I had never given up this hope, it didn't always look like it in all these years.
All the more it is pleasing to see now, how we managed to change minds in academia and industry.
Already 7 years ago (in 2015), our proposal for an official Eclipse project was accepted. While some developers retired, new ones joined. Currently, we have 8 committers - and many more contributors!
In the past 3.5 years, 4diac IDE has shaped my work, my PhD studies, and my free time: I deeply enjoy developing new features that benefit users of the IDE.
I am happy to be part of the development community, which welcomed me warmly and is a great network of support.
,
Bianca Wiesmayr (LIT CPS Lab, JKU).
In the last years, the maturity of Eclipse 4diac has increased tremendously.
We implemented numerous improvements and usability enhancements that we did not even dare to dream of 15 years ago.
This would not been possible without the feedback from our users.
Alois Zoitl (LIT CPS Lab, JKU),
one of the co-founders and project lead, points it out very nicely:
Many thanks for the feedback from our users and for the fruitful discussion sessions we had in the last 15 years.
I am looking forward to many more constructive discussions for further improvements to turn Eclipse 4diac into the best IEC 61499 solution.
Hence, we are looking forward to the next 15 years of Eclipse 4diac!
Cheers,
The Eclipse 4diac Team
Age: 356 daysAs in every year, Eclipse 4diac participated in the Google Summer of Code to extend our community.
Paul will work this summer on 4diac IDE in the context of testing Function Blocks (semi-)automatically. This is a part of our ambitions to make developing Function Blocks in 4diac IDE easier for you.
Paul is a physics student with additional interest in computer science. With this project, he hopes to gain practical experience in Java and learn working on large-scale projects with collaborative development.
In this summer, he will gain first experience in contributing to an open source project. We are always happy to introduce new contributors to our processes! Our committers Bianca and Alois serve as mentors for the project.
We will post updates over the summer!
Cheers,
The Eclipse 4diac Team
Age: 519 daysWe are happy to announce the first maintenance release for Eclipse 4diac 2.0 providing 29 bug fixes for 4diac IDE as well as 2 bug fixes for 4diac FORTE. This include fixes for monitoring subapp interfaces and in the 4diac FORTE C++ code generation. A full list of all fixed issues can be found here.
As always please download, test, and report problems and bugs.
For users of the previouse releases a simple Help -> Check of Updates
should upgrade you to 2.0.1.
Cheers,
The Eclipse 4diac Team
Age: 587 daysToday we have something new in our news section an interview with one of our latest users Tibalt Zhao from HIT Robot Group.
| Alois: | Who are you? |  |
| Tibalt: | We are the R&D team of HIITTECH (哈工智云) which is incubated from HIT robot group. Our company is dedicated in delivering software solution for advanced process control. Currently, we are focusing on cement industry and circulate fluid bed (a kind of boiler). I am the team leader. The team comprises of software engineers and service engineers. | |
| Alois: | How did you learn about IEC 61499 and the Eclipse 4diac project? | |
| Tibalt: | We are a team experienced both in terminal units and SCADA systems applied in the electricity grid. We have our own flow (graphical) programming platform to develop control logic in terminal units. The platform is a key to ensure quality for requirements different from batch to batch of hardware delivery. We are following the status of IEC 61131 and IEC 61499 as they are the standard for industrial control languages. Eclipse 4diac is one of the most popular open-source project for IEC 61499. And at the beginning of our project, our colleagues recommended Eclipse 4diac to us. And after looked into the docs and codes, we decided to adopt 4diac as our control platform. | |
| Alois: | You have contributed many bug fixes and enhancements to the 4diac project. So, what's your team's goal? | |
| Tibalt: |
When I am designing the architecture, I read from you and James Christensen that IEC 61499 is a standard for software reuse in embedded,
distributed control systems.
This is what we are looking for, the philosophy, standard, graphical programming, and the open-source project. We are feeding back with code for bug fix, enhancements, and suggestions to the 4diac project as we respect EPL license. We believe that the community's prosperity could benefit all who are working with 4diac and IEC 61499. Our business value is in FBs we are encapsulated and total solution we delivered to our customer with HMI and big data database. |
|
| Alois: | What do you like most on 4diac? | |
| Tibalt: | First, the tiny footprints of the run time environment. Second, the architecture taking care of hard real time application. And the RTE which could run cross platform including Linux, windows, freeRTOS and so on. | |
| Alois: | What in 4diac is disturbing your work most? | |
| Tibalt: | The way to composite function block is a little bit disturbing as we have done lots of CFBs. We hope to see the subapplication type soon. I heard that in 2.0.0 release, we can have subapplication type. | |
| Alois: | Yes we are working hard to make subapplication support better. But what is exactly the problem of CFBs if I may ask? | |
| Tibalt: | First, every time we make a CFB, we need to generate cpp codes from IDE and compile them with source code of 4diac FORTE before it can be tested. You know, the process can be done for several times to get the CFB ready to release even by an experienced engineer. And even a tiny new requirement, for example change the pin name or add an output pin to give more details of failure execution, we have to repeat the compilation process. Secondly, IDE cannot "watch" in the second tier of function block network, which means if there is a CFB embedded inside another CFB, it is almost impossible to debug. Engineers need a good way to encapsulate the FBs as we all know that a very big FBN is too complex to maintain. We can make the basic blocks in IDE is a good start. But please make the process simple that the service engineer could build the blocks by themselves within IDE. | |
| Alois: | Can you describe/show something about your first 4diac application? | |
| Tibalt: |
Sure. Our application is the advanced process control for a mill.
|
|
| Alois: | Wow this is pretty impressive. Thanks a lot for your insights. | |
Age: 595 daysHave you been waiting for 4diac 2.0.0? It's finally here!
We've been working on improving your experience with Eclipse 4diac. For 4diac IDE, the following major changes were introduced:
- Improved usabilty and editing efficiency of all editors
- Introduced monitoring for Structured Datatypes
- Introduced editing history during undo/redo to quickly find the last editing position
- Improved layout generation results
- Improved/introduced input validation, show error messages
- Introduced error markers to handle broken projects more gracefully
- Of course, we have also implemented numerous bug fixes.
For 4diac FORTE, we have mostly provided bug fixes and stabilization patches:
- Gracefully handling full external event queues
- Fixed issues for compiling on Mac OS
- Implicit upcasts are allowed for constant inputs at FBs (e.g., WORD#AFFE on a DWORD input)
For details, please consider the release page of our New and Noteworthy.
We sincerely hope that you enjoy our graduation release. We are looking foward to sharing more documentation on the new features in the upcoming weeks.
Cheers,
The Eclipse 4diac Team
Age: 603 daysWe are happy to announce that the Eclipse 4diac passed the graduation review today. This is a major step for the project and its community. We could show that we are working as open source project following the Eclipse development process. It also means that we are leaving the incubation phase.
Thanks to the great 4diac community for making this possible.
Cheers,
The Eclipse 4diac Team
Age: 633 daysAs every year, the beginning of September starts the feature freeze phase for the 4diac autumn release. We have many new features and bug fixes in this release:
- 4diac IDE:
- Reworked nearly all icons
- Monitoring inside of typed subapps and composite FB instances
- Monitoring of subapp interface pins
- Error markers are created if FB types are missing or if pins of connections can not be found
- Constants at FB inputs are validated whether they match the data type
- Many smaller usability improvements
- 4diac FORTE:
- Mostly stability improvements
More details will follow in the next weeks as separate news items.
We provide a nightly build update site which allows you to automatically update your 4diac IDE.
Just add
http://download.eclipse.org/4diac/nightly/update
to your update sites.
Cheers,
The Eclipse 4diac Team
Age: 710 daysThe last few months we've been working hard on redesigning the icons of the 4diac IDE.
As this is the first major revisit of the existing icons, we had to change a lot. Major motivations for the redesign were to increase readability and consistency throughout the icons.
Icons Done
This is the list of icons already redesigned.
Function Blocks
Application
Basic Function Block
Composite Function Block
Service Interface Function Block
Simple Function Block
Subapplication typed Function Block
Subapplication untyped Function Block
Type Library
Data Type
System
System
System Configuration
Device
Device
Resource
Event/Data/Adapters
Event
Event in 
Event Out
Data
Data In 
Data Out
Adapter
Adapter In
Adapter Out
Interface
ECC
ECC
ECC Action
ECC State
ECC Add State
ECC Algorithm
All these icons are Work in Progress, they may be subject to change.
Cheers,
The Eclipse 4diac Team
Age: 759 daysWe are very proud to announce the Eclipse 4diac 1.14.0 release!
With Eclipse 4diac 1.14.0 we provide you with a large set of improvements in 4diac IDE and 4diac FORTE:
- 4diac IDE:
- System file content is shown in one single editor with bread-crumb navigation
- The infinite drawing canvas was replaced by an incremental growing canvas. This gives better feedback on the size of the network or ECC.
- Possibility of expanding subapps for showing subapp content in-line with its parent
- Inside untyped subapps the subapp's comment is shown at the top of the editing area
- Typed subapps can now contain untyped subapps
- The content of typed subapps can be watched as part of the instance similar to a composite fb in a dedicated viewer
- Parse errors are shown as errors in the problem view which is added to the system perspective
- A default CMakeList.txt file can be generated during export
- Reworked simulated device manager to better show currently running simulated devices
- Implicit upcast are now allowed during connection creation (e.g., INT to DINT)
- Transition conditions can now directly be edited in ECC graphics
- A struct can be created by selecting several interface elements of a subapp
- Many bug fixes and smaller improvements:
- Text labels in diagrams are not cut off any more
- Boot-file and FM generation is again available
- Improved automatic layout generation
- Modernized function block appearance with a drop shadow
- Several issues in the type library leading to broken projects and FBs
- 4diac FORTE:
- Improved timer handler to use less resources, which should lead to less jitter
- CMake modules have now an option to be enabled per default
- Several compile/portabilty issues where fixed: Modbus, Windows XP, ming64, Piface
All in all we could address 150 issues in the work for the new Eclipse 4diac version. A full list of all bugs addressed in this release can be found on the 1.14.0 release page.
As always please download, test, and report any issues. For users of the previous releases a simple Help -> Check of Updates should upgrade you to 1.14.0.
Cheers,
The 4diac Team
PS: With Eclipse 4diac 1.14.0 the 4diac IDE requires at least Java 11 installed on your machine! If you download the official 4diac IDE package a correct Java version is already included. Many thanks to the Eclipse JustJ project for that support.
PPS: Windows 10 users: Windows 10 Defender significantly slows down Eclipse and therfore also 4diac IDE. The reason is Windows 10 Defender scanning the JAR files. The problem has been reported to Microsoft here. Until then, a workaround to this problem is to add 4diac IDE root directory to Windows 10 Defender's exclusion list, detailed steps are shared here.
Note: This is not just an Eclipse 4diac issue on Windows 10.
Age: 766 daysYour patience is paying of. In the last weeks we could fix a few major issues in 4diac IDE. One clearly visible example you can see below. Thanks to Bianca's detective skills we where finally able to fix the cut of texts when zooming in or out of our graphical editors.
Cheers,
The Eclipse 4diac Team
Age: 779 daysIn the last two weeks we noticed a few major issues in the release version of 4diac IDE. As we want to further investigate this we have to decided to further postpone the 4diac 1.14.0 release to May 3rd.
We are sorry for the inconvenience. 4diac 1.14.0 will have an amazing list of new features. So it is definitly worth the waiting.
Cheers,
The Eclipse 4diac Team
Age: 861 daysWe are proud to announce the first maintenance release for Eclipse 4diac 1.13 providing 12 bug fixes for 4diac IDE. This include fixes for the virtualDNS handling, corner cases in the new selection feedback and in the 4diac FORTE code exporter. A full list of all fixed issues can be found here.
As always please download, test, and report problems and bugs.
For users of the previouse releases a simple Help -> Check of Updates
should upgrade you to 1.13.1.
Cheers,
The Eclipse 4diac Team