Product description

The TwinCAT Automation Interface enables the automatic creation and manipulation of TwinCAT XAE configurations via programming/scripting code. The automation of a TwinCAT configuration is available through so-called automation interfaces which can be accessed from all COM-capable programming languages (e.g. C++ or .NET) and also from dynamic script languages - e.g. Windows PowerShell, IronPython or even legacy VBscript. These automation interfaces are bound to the Visual Studio Automation Model and extend Visual Studio with TwinCAT3 features.

Product description 1:

TwinCAT Automation Interface enables an efficient engineering process by giving customers the possibility to automate the configuration of a full TwinCAT solution.

Traditionally, a machine configuration had to be manually adapted to each new project or had even to be created from scratch, which could not only involve a tremendous amount of engineering time and therefore costs but is also error-prone because of human mistakes.

Product description 2:

With TwinCAT Automation Interface, the process of adapting TwinCAT configurations to a new environment or even create new TwinCAT configurations from scratch can be automated according to the customers needs.

Product description 3:

Readers should continue with the following topics:

Basics

Topic	Description
Creating/Loading TwinCAT XAE configurations	Describes how to create or open a TwinCAT configuration
Navigating TwinCAT XAE	Describes how to navigate through a TwinCAT configuration
Custom tree item parameters	Describes how to access custom parameters of an item. This is important to access configuration parameters of a TwinCAT tree item.
Implementing a COM message filter	Describes how to implement an own COM message filter to circumvent rejected COM calls

Best practice

Topic	Description
Creating and handling PLC projects	Describes how to handle PLC projects
Creating and handling PLC POUs	Describes how to handle PLC objects/code
Creating and handling PLC Libraries	Describes how to handle PLC libraries, repositories and placeholder
Creating and handling MOTION projects	Describes how to create TwinCAT Motion projects (NC-Task, Axes, ...)
Creating and handling EtherCAT devices	Describes how to create EtherCAT devices and connect them to an EtherCAT topology
Creating and handling TwinCAT Measurement	Describes how to handle TwinCAT Measurement projects.
Creating and handling TcCOM modules	Describes how to handle TcCOM modules.
Using templates	Describes the process of template generation and template usage.
Creating and handling network variables	Describes how to create network variables (publisher/subscriber variables)
Creating and handling Tasks	Describes how to create Tasks and link them with other objects (PLC-Projects, ...)
From offline to online configurations	Some IO devices need physical address information before the configuration can be activated. This article explains how to retrieve and set this information.
Accessing the Error List window of Visual Studio	The Error List can be very helpful for debugging and diagnostic purposes
Accessing window tabs in Visual Studio	Describes how to get access to Visual Studio windows.
Handling different versions of Visual Studio	Describes how different Versions of Visual Studio can be used for Automation Interface
Attaching to running Visual Studio instances	Demonstrates how you can attach to existing (already running) Visual Studio instances to use Automation Interface
Setting TwinCAT target platform	Describes how to set the TwinCAT target platform for compilation.

Additionally, this documentation also includes a full API reference of all interfaces. The How to and Sample sections offer a free composition of script code fragments, configuration steps and demo projects. They also contain an unsorted and growing list of "real-world" samples.