PLC Panel Builds Reviewed Plus the Exact Learning Path I Would Follow Today [Full Q&A 2026]

How's it going everyone? Welcome to the next stream in which we're going to tackle some of the most asked questions in our industry on the popular industrial automation and manufacturing channels.

The S7-1500 display and the joke behind it

The first comment comes from the username HardIntegral, and the user says, "Watching Odyssey the way Nolan intended, prime cinematic experience."

I personally have an S7-1500 series PLC sitting behind me. So for those who are unfamiliar, the comment he is making is that of course there is a screen onto which you can put an image. This is used for different purposes. You can use it for troubleshooting. You can use it for set points. Obviously it's not currently powered on, but you can change the IP address of the device. And you can also add your own image. Usually people add their company logos or funny memes or interesting pictures.

So this user is referencing the movie that has been released recently. It was shot in 4K, and there's even a higher resolution than 4K, so ultimately it is supposed to be experienced in very high resolution. There's an IMAX version. You can go to some very high end theaters where you could see the movie as the director intended.

Obviously this is a joke for our industry. I was waiting for someone to finally do this. People put all sorts of different things onto the PLC. This created a lot of comments and responses in our industry, and if you have the S7-1500 series PLC you know exactly what he's talking about. If you have a different platform, I've got also an Opto 22 behind me, and in theory you could be playing videos in much higher resolution. There's no other point to that specific comment. It was just extremely popular on the subreddit this week, so I wanted to give some context for those of you who may not have understood what was behind the image.

A large enterprise ControlLogix panel

The second post we're looking at this week is something that is very familiar to me, which is a very large scale enterprise Rockwell Automation build. The username ExoticSeas is showcasing a big PLC cabinet. If we click on the image we can try and zoom in on certain parts. The zoom in the native Reddit app is not the greatest, but we can clearly see that there is a ControlLogix rack inside of this PLC system. And I like this build.

We also see a secondary ControlLogix chassis, and they come, if you've not worked with these before, in different sizes. The amount of slots you can put into them is fixed, meaning unlike for example the 1769 series where you can keep adding in theory indefinitely if you have a large enough panel. There's obviously some constraints in terms of what kind of I/O and how you delimit them with power supplies. In this case you buy two fixed racks that are going to have a set amount of ControlLogix I/O points. I would have purchased the same racks because there's plenty of space inside of this panel to just scoot these elements over.

We have the PLC, and I believe that's the PLC that's sitting right there in the rack to the right hand side. We have a bunch of I/O points, obviously digital and analog, very hard to tell from this image. Even if we zoomed in there's not enough resolution. It's all broken down into the points down below.

Very neat panel. We have an HMI also on the door. I would assume it is a PanelView series, probably 7 Performance, because it's connecting to a fairly large system and maybe multiple systems. We also have what seems to be power supplies here on the right hand side.

I'm not seeing a switch, which is a little bit surprising for a panel of this size, but it's possible that the only PLC is really this one, and so one port would probably go to the rack over here for an EtherNet/IP based card, and the other one is going to the plant network, and there's simply not a need for a switch in this specific cabinet.

There's nothing else really to say about the general state of the cabinet. This is really good work. We can see some labels on the devices. I am squinting to try and see. I believe these are fuse blocks, not necessarily relays. We have the standard breakout for the ControlLogix chassis, which makes it easier to wire in the field. You can land your cables from the sensors and field devices on the right hand side here. Really nice cabinet. I'm assuming it's going to have a lot of holes drilled into it once it gets to the plant, unless that is the infeed where it comes in. Surprised not to see some kind of a cooling system. There's not a whole lot in terms of hardware, there's no VFDs, so maybe it's not needed, but it's something that I typically see in these installations.

A gutted Festo servo drive cabinet

We're looking at a lot of different electrical panels this week, which is interesting to say the least. A lot of times we have a different set of questions that are the most upvoted, but it seems like the trend continues. In this case we have a question from the username Egg Sandwich, and he says, "The hell is this? Sorry people, I'm an outsider. I've acquired a couple of cabinets like this and was wondering what it is exactly. How far off is this thing from making stepper motors chooch?"

So we're going to click on the image, and we see an electrical panel which seems to have been dismantled for a couple of reasons from its original state. We see some of the cabling down here has been disconnected. I would assume there were a lot of terminal blocks. Why they were disconnected, or I guess what the state of the external I/O is, is unclear. We see some ventilation properly going from bottom to the top or top to bottom depending on the airflow. We have some good grounding at the bottom. Nothing to say on that front.

What he's referring to in terms of stepper motors or servo motors, depending on how you label them, are these Festo drives. I've actually made a couple of videos on the SolisPLC YouTube channel because a couple of years ago Festo had sent some of these drives for me to investigate and make some comments on. These drives are fairly easy to work with once you get the right software and systems in place.

What you will notice is that there's a bunch of wires that have been cut off from the output and the input side of the drives, and those are the inputs and outputs to and from the motors in the field. I have a couple of them on the other side of my home lab. Two cables go to the motor. You have two cables that are the twenty four volt power supply, and you have an Ethernet based or Modbus based connection, depending on the flavor that you have purchased. I believe this is Modbus, though the image is a little bit blurry. You can communicate to the servo drives and devices very easily from a variety of different manufacturers of PLCs, which is exactly what Festo intended. They have their own brand of PLCs which runs CODESYS if I'm not completely mistaken, but you can run this from Allen Bradley, which I have done on a CompactLogix as well as a ControlLogix without any issues.

We obviously have more loose cable, but we have a panel which contains ten of these different drives, and we see that the Ethernet comes in from the top. They're daisy chained. We don't really know which flavor of PLC is going to be used for this. We have some power supplies. I have not looked at the specific part number of this Siemens power supply. We also have some Weidmuller ProTop power supplies, and we can see it's a very beefy power supply of twenty four volts at forty amps, which is feeding all of these units as well as the attached servo and stepper motors once they are installed. Of course the cables have been cut off, so everything needs to be redone.

I hate to see this, so this immediately tells me that a person that had absolutely no knowledge in electrical systems has removed this cabinet, because these terminal blocks are extremely easy to remove from the actual drive by pressing with just a small screwdriver into these blue notches. I can demonstrate this on my own drive, but this is the most fundamental or basic thing you could do as a technician or engineer. So whoever took this apart had no pride in their work. They simply cut off all of the cables, which means that the servo drives or the motors got shipped or maybe sold to somebody else.

They're going to have to re-terminate all of these wires. They're going to have to strip back the cable and remake all of it, which is doable. It just added a ton of labor for absolutely no reason, where the terminals could have been very easily disconnected. So absolutely hate to see this. You can immediately tell who is selling you this equipment and who was the person that took this specific panel apart.

A first PLC project running house lighting

We've got a next question and comment from someone who has designed their first project in industrial automation and PLCs. We love to see these in our channels because people are ultimately excited about our industry, are bringing new solutions, and are driving industrial automation forward.

This comes from the username Muku610. "My first PLC project. Hey all. Thought I'd share my first ever PLC project with all of you. This is a prototype to replace my existing centralized low voltage lighting system touch plate in my house. I definitely need to work on my cable management for the final install, but I'm very happy I've gotten this far, even though I've got a long way to go. Any advice is appreciated."

Let's click on the image and see what we've got here. We have a very long DIN rail, which comes in different sizes, so I typically advise people to order just shorter versions. They're easier to work with, especially at home. We have a few light sockets, and these are, depending on the region, either one ten or two hundred and twenty, which is why they are wired through relays. These are Finder relays that we have on the DIN rail. Very common to see. I don't see the actual voltage. The relay obviously closes whatever power is coming in.

We also see the AutomationDirect Productivity series PLC, which is right there. And we have a couple of I/O points. I'm assuming all of this is digital I/O unless I'm missing something. We have different switches, which probably indicates that he's just reading the open and closed switch on either one of these buttons. It is a momentary signal which goes back into the input side, and then he's closing the relay, depending if it's normally open or normally closed, to run some of the lights as he described for his house application.

On the bottom we have a WAGO power supply, which is providing five amps for everything on the circuit. More than adequate. We see a couple of tools. Nothing extremely crazy. In terms of recommendations, it seems like all of these components could have been placed on maybe a foot long of DIN rail, which would make the wiring a lot more manageable and easy to see. I don't see the need to run the long cabling to the relays, but that's maybe more of an aesthetic question than actual functionality.

If you want to push this further, maybe there is some rationale to move this to a software called Home Assistant, which runs on Linux inside of Docker, and you can run this connected to the PLC. You can also tie this into an app you install on your phone, or just the web application through which you can remote into the system and make it a lot easier. So to summarize, if you want to push this a little bit further, not only on the PLC side but also in terms of automation and other applications on the IT side, Home Assistant is definitely something to look into.

PLC-5 trainers and the software problem underneath

The next post is a flashback into a piece of history of our industry. Those of you who have followed me for a little bit of time know that I've only graduated, and I say only, it's been over a decade now, but in 2013. In 2013 the latest and greatest, at least on the Rockwell side, has already been ControlLogix and the advanced series of even CompactLogix PLCs.

That being said, a lot of my work still remains with PLC-5s, with older microcontroller series, with SLCs, different versions right from 5/01s to 5/05s depending on the nature of the factory, with Data Highway Plus, DeviceNet, ControlNet, so a lot of older protocols that are still running plants today.

We do have a post from the username MiltonDrivesWaySignal, and he managed to score some PLCs from the PLC-5 era, which is very cool. I personally have a rack of a PLC-5 in my parents' house that I have dismantled and stored there for now. It is very difficult, or expensive I would say, to transport or ship that hardware, as many of you know how much it weighs. So it's really cool to see that he managed to get one or two of the trainers that you originally would be trained on with PLC-5s.

Like I said, I have not been trained on PLC-5s. I have been trained on ControlLogix type of systems. But I have learned PLC-5s as well as RSLogix 5 as a result of supporting a lot of equipment that still runs on them. So this is a very cool find. We can still see the parallel port on the side of the PLC for those of you who have not been exposed to this type of a system. We see some missing connectors, so hopefully he's able to connect via this RS-485 port to this specific rack. But this is great. It looks like it powers on. There is a green light, so everything is working as expected. We can look at the images individually and see that all of the hardware seems to be at least in good shape based on the boot sequence.

Once he gets connected and is able to communicate with them, we'll get more updates hopefully. The username says, "Wasn't expecting to buy these, but I saw the listing and knew exactly what they were. Anyone who's gone to an AB PLC class will recognize these as the portable demonstration trainer units. Feeling very lucky to have these pieces of history. Can't wait to get set up and go online with them. Anyone have one of those golden floppies for RSLogix 5? I'm sure I can find something out there."

This is, I would say, fortunate but also unfortunate in our industry. A lot of the times when the OEMs discontinue the hardware, they also pull the ability to download and even purchase the software. I have multiple clients and factories that I know of that still utilize PLC-5s and SLCs in various family ranges, and it is important for those who are in the field who are working at those facilities to have access to the software. So the fact that you cannot buy it anymore is a little bit unfortunate.

If you go through the right channels, if you talk to the distributors, you can sometimes find your way to those licenses, but it is very much so difficult to get access. But this is absolutely amazing. I personally would love to purchase more PLC-5s and other PLCs of similar time range just for interest's sake. I love hardware. I love industrial automation. So having some of these pieces that actually work is absolutely amazing.

What should a beginner actually learn first

The final question that we have this week is on the education side, but very much related to the industrial automation space. We have a user by the name Tanklin Janklin, and they say, "What's actually needed? A friend of mine is helping me learn automation. He gave me this board of his to practice on. It has two PLCs, a CompactLogix and a Micro850, and I have been using CCW, Connected Components Workbench, and Studio 5000. I am worried I will go down the rabbit holes of learning things that are not necessary when starting out. So what should the top things to focus be? Ladder logic, HMI, Ethernet comms. Any help is appreciated."

Obviously we don't have more context on whether he's looking to land a job, if he's an electrician, if he's an engineer, if he's looking to focus more on PLCs and HMIs. That's the feeling at least that I'm getting. Or if he's looking to get into more SCADA and data type of things. But let's try and do our best to give him some advice.

First and foremost, we do have an unmanaged switch, this is a Stratix 2000. There's not a whole lot we can do there. We have some terminal blocks. We have the circuit breakers. We have contactors that can be actuated by either PLC. We do have a CompactLogix, which is L38ERM. Very good and very expensive model of a CompactLogix. This is a 1769 series PLC, which includes motion as described by the last letter M at the very end. We do have a power supply. We do not have any I/O for this specific PLC, which means that there is not a whole lot you can do in terms of physical I/O. But of course you can practice programming in Studio 5000.

On the other hand side we have the Micro850 series PLC, and I'm not as familiar with the exact part numbers that you see there. It's going to tell you what kind of inputs and outputs you have for your specific chassis. I do have one of these PLCs sitting behind me. Those of you who are maybe listening to this obviously can't see it, but I have an example of one of these PLCs, so I'm very familiar with the programming side of Connected Components Workbench.

Going back to what he currently does have, you can program and you can practice with CCW. There is a free version that you can download. You don't have the same availability to Studio 5000. Maybe he got a license, maybe he's got access some other way. That is not up to us to judge.

I would focus, if you're looking to get into the industry, on Studio 5000. Studio 5000 is heavily utilized in our space, and in large enterprise it is the platform of choice. I have seen some smaller skids utilize the Micro850, and there's going to be different families of controllers that can be utilized with CCW, but very much so a smaller install base in my general opinion.

He's also asking about HMI and everything else. I would start by learning ladder logic, especially if you are in the North American region. I would then focus on learning FactoryTalk View ME, which once again you need to have access to the license, but will allow you to simulate a lot of the push buttons, a lot of the sensors, and will allow you to maybe create some scales. You don't need to have the actual HMI. You can design those screens and connect to your CompactLogix PLC or the Micro850 to then communicate from your laptop running an instance of FactoryTalk View ME to the PLC. So you can accomplish quite a bit on that side.

What I would also recommend, and I would say this is a little bit extra once you start in the field assuming that he's not already working in automation, is that you should be starting to learn Ignition. Ignition is an HMI, it's a SCADA, it's a historian, it's an MES. They have a full free Inductive University which you can learn at your own pace. You can also create some data capture. You can start simulating interesting processes via Ignition, and you can push your learning forward. This will also enable you to start thinking about Ethernet communication. You will start learning about different protocols, whether that's MQTT, OPC UA or DA, depending on how you're connected. You will also be deploying applications, and you can run Ignition on your laptop for all intents and purposes with a fully free license. I don't get any commission for selling Ignition. I just think it's a good natural progression once you have learned PLC, HMI, and then you're in this SCADA, data and visualization type of a platform.

So I hope all of that helps. If you have any other questions, if you have any other topics you would like to discuss, if you disagree with some of my comments, please leave me a note. Feel free to reach out to me on YouTube. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Happy to discuss industrial automation, manufacturing, operational excellence, and all of the surrounding topics. In any case, I'll see you all next week, and have a good weekend.