System requirements

Hardware and software

The TwinCAT Automation Interface is installed automatically during TwinCAT setup. Consequently, the same hardware and software requirements apply as for TwinCAT System Manager / TwinCAT 3 XAE (Engineering). When using the Automation Interface to configure a remote TwinCAT participant (XAR), the remote version of TwinCAT should generally be the same as the version on the development computer. The Automation Interface also provides access to the TwinCAT Remote Manager, allowing you to load a specific version of the TwinCAT project if a lower version is being used on the target system.

Please note that you can run the Automation Interface script on both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms, but you must ensure that your program/script was compiled for 32-bit mode and runs in 32-bit mode.

Recommended programming languages

The following programming languages are recommended for use with the TwinCAT Automation Interface:

• .NET C#

Please note: Even though C++ implementations work, we strongly recommend using one of the languages listed above because of their simple and straightforward programming concepts with regard to COM. In this documentation, C# is used in most of the samples.

Recommended scripting languages

Although every scripting language with COM support may be used to access TwinCAT Automation Interface, we recommend to use the Windows Powershell as it provides the best level of integration between Operating System and application. Please note that at least TwinCAT 3.1 Build 4020.0 is required to use dynamic languages like the Windows Powershell.