WinPLC

The WinPLC was an excellent PLC controller. It started in 1995 and ended in 2012. Microsoft stopped licensing Windows CE - a necessary part of the WinPLC. When this happened, the owners of the WinPLC and the makers of Think & Do Software (flow-chart based programming environment) had no choice but to discontinue the product and support for the product.

Tens of thousands of WinPLC control systems were developed in the nearly 20 years of the WinPLC. Many are still running today - as stated, excellent controller. But, they are starting to fail for a variety of reasons - 20-30 year old components, power surges, plastic degradation, … 

What does a system owner do if they have one of these systems? You could possibly try to buy used WinPLC components. Setting aside the question of being able to trust unknown sellers, do you really want to trust your system with another part that may be 20 - 30 years old? Also, unless you have Think & Do Software and an old PC that can run Think & Do, you will not be able to load your project into this old, replacement PLC. You can contact someone like KCC Software that has old laptops and Think & Do Software with the hope the old project can be uploaded (assuming the old WinPLC is still running, was not installed using a password or as a runtime-only version)

We have successfully upgraded more than 50 WinPLC systems by re-writing the control program for a new Do-more PLC CPU. The Do-more CPU runs in the exact same backplane as the WinPLC and supports the same I/O and communication cards. In ALL of these 50+ upgrades, the work was done without a single wiring change! A new CPU and new programming (and typically a new HMI) were all that was needed to breathe new life into an obsolete system with an unsupported problem.

In many of these cases, the Think & Do project was available or could be uploaded from the WinPLC. In these cases, the re-writing of the control program was made easier. But, even when the Think & Do project was not available, KCC Software has been able to recreate the needed control system from scratch and restore system operations still with new hardware that will be supported for decades to come.Think & Do was offered in three different products with each product having many different versions over the years. Think & Do Live was the original and was offered in versions from 2.0 through 5.7. Think & Do Studio was next and offered in versions starting with a 6 or 7 (i.e. 6.5). Lastly, Think & Do 8 was offered (after Microsoft stopped selling Visio).

When connecting to a WinPLC project, you must have the correct Think & Do product and a version of that product equal to or newer than the version used to save the project into the WinPLC. There is no way by just looking at the WinPLC to know which product or version was used. Also, there is no way to know if the project was saved with a password or saved as a runtime-only installation which means the source code is not saved in the PLC. We have had remarkable success restoring old Think & Do projects, but it is not easy and is not assured that it is possible.