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Python in Process Control?

Ville Vainio ville at spammers.com
Thu Sep 30 13:42:13 EDT 2004 
>>>>> "Wolfgang" == Wolfgang Keller <wolfgang.keller.nospam at gmx.de> writes:

    Wolfgang> ...does really noone use Python for industrial control
    Wolfgang> applications?

People are known to do this.

    Wolfgang> At least I didn't manage to find any publicly available
    Wolfgang> modules for such things as OPC/fieldbus communication
    Wolfgang> etc...

Such things don't necessarily float into open source. My adventures w/
OPC involved both Python and C++ code - with my current knowledge of
Python there would probably have been much less C++ code :-). OPC is
just DCOM, which should work directly w/ Python+pywin32 extensions
(used to be called win32all, which might help your googlings). Get
Mark Hammond's book Python Programming on Win32:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pythonwin32/

Alternatively, you could buy/find a C library that makes OPC simple
(i.e. no need to deal w/ COM), and wrap it up in Python.

And BTW, OPC sucks. Those industrial decision makers must have smoked
lots of crack when they came up w/ the idea of using DCOM as the
integrator-facing interface that is supposed to be easy and
straightforward.

-- 
Ville Vainio   http://tinyurl.com/2prnb
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