How to debug sketch inside Arduino OPTA WIFI?

Official Hardware Opta
1

Hello there!

  • I just bought a new Arduino OPTA WIFI and connected it to the Arcuino PLC IDE successfully (after an hour of trying but I got there at the end ...).
  • I made a simple project with shared variable between the IEC-61131 ST and Sketch program and love the OPTA PLC so far!

I want now to program a MQTT connection to my local broker and I stumbled upon a simple problem:
How do I debug the sketch inside the Arduino OPTA?

I need to see internal variables, if the sketch runs, what errors are there etc.

I am trying to use the serial monitor for this but with no prevail so far ... where can I see my serial monitor output in the Arduino PLC IDE? Is this even possible - and how it is intended for me to debug the sketch?

1 Like
2

I looked into the OPTA documentation integrated within the Arduino PLC IDE and there is not a single mention of "sketch" inside that document using ctrl+f

image
image1469×1336 60.4 KB

I have also tried the web documentation 1 , 2 and 3

1 Like
3

Hello

MQTT on the PLC IDE is not 100% compatible at the moment, you can run it but you might have issues.

To debug on the PLC IDE, you can use the "Watch" window to see variables' values or "Debug > Live Debug Mode"

1 Like
4

I made the MQTT for somehow and for now it is okay.

My main question is about debugging.

To debug on the PLC IDE, you can use the "Watch" window to see variables' values or "Debug > Live Debug Mode"

But this is only true for variables that are inside IEC program am I right?

I want to debug the sketch variables and the sketch itself. Is it possible?

1 Like
5

Hi @JacobSzlaur, it's a pretty dodgy solution, but you can run a stand-alone Serial monitor like CoolTerm on the port to get some amount of debugging to work. It doesn't like having the PLC IDE also connected, so you need to go back and forth, but it's a partial solution.

6

I am really disappointed from Arduino OPTA ... it feels so much underdeveloped :frowning:

If you can't even DEBUG the program that runs inside the HW!
How it is supposed to be used in production???

3 Likes
7

Agreed. It shouldn't be too difficult to implement a serial monitor window into the Arduino PLC IDE at least, so hopefully that's some low hanging fruit for their development team on the next release. The development environment seems to be very temperamental to connect and maintain consistent comms, so perhaps that has been a barrier.

It also seems possible to crash the arduino core but have the PLC core continue to work (I'm thinking I'm possibly exceeding resources during MQTT secure messaging), where nothing comes up on the external serial monitor at all, so a view of resource commit or equivalent would be amazing but probably a bit too much to ask, haha.

8

Any update from Arduino or devs? Are their nightly builds of the plc ide?

I want to use this thing so badly and I actually love it for the most part but it is shelved until I can bring in custom libraries, update both the sketch and plc program over tcp and the hangups with mqtt connections are addressed.

Is there a road map or an in-development list?

2 Likes
9

Unfortunetly no … I feel like it will b e several months or even years until this product will be useable in production environments …

Such a shame because the hype was pretty huge - I hope I am wrong with my prediction! :grin:

1 Like
10

You can use custom libraries https://docs.arduino.cc/software/plc-ide/tutorials/plc-programming-introduction#library-management

Now the Arduino IoT Cloud is compatible with the Arduino PLC IDE