CODESYS Virtual PLC on OnLogic, Safety Included
CODESYS and OnLogic are showing what “hardware-independent PLC” actually looks like in the real world: a soft PLC with functional safety running on an OnLogic industrial PC (Debian Linux with a real-time patch), with Virtual Control and Virtual Safe Control containerised for deployment at scale.
In this walkthrough we cover:
What a soft PLC is, and why determinism matters
How CODESYS approaches safety on standard compute (including the move to hardware-independent safety up to SIL 3)
Why OnLogic industrial hardware matters for sub-millisecond cycles
Security implications, consolidation, and reducing attack surface
The demo stack: EtherCAT, FSoE (FailSafe over EtherCAT), and distributed safe I/O
If you’re building factory automation systems and you care about real-time behaviour, safety, and scalable deployment across multiple sites, this is worth watching.
Chapters (timestamps)
00:00 Soft PLC demo intro (CODESYS + OnLogic)
00:40 What a soft PLC is vs a traditional PLC
01:48 Determinism and real-time behaviour on industrial PCs
02:23 Functional safety in software, and what changed “since last year”
03:14 Why OnLogic hardware for CODESYS Virtual Control
05:31 Security, CRA pressure, and containerisation
08:08 Demo walkthrough: EtherCAT + FSoE + distributed safe I/O
09:49 Swap I/O vendors without re-certifying the full application (why this matters)
11:44 Consolidating motion + safety + control onto one platform
12:20 Scaling to fleets and global deployments (pre-installed images, lifecycle support)
14:37 Wrap-up