Jakob Sagatowski

Hey all!
I haven't posted a video here on YouTube for 8 months (!). Let me explain why.

1.
Though not on purpose, our company has turned into a part-time unpaid advertising pillar for Beckhoff/TwinCAT 3. Though I'm very happy that the TwinCAT 3 course on YouTube has received so many views (2.3 million video views as of today, 225.000+ watch hours!), it has also meant that we're filled with questions about Beckhoff and TwinCAT every week. It was never the intention to make any money off the course, but it has lead to an unsustainable amount of work supporting all the companies asking questions about Beckhoff and TwinCAT. I want to point out that this is not Beckhoff's fault, as I created the course with the idea that I think the automation industry should be more open and it should not cost thousands of $€£ to get into our industry. Beckhoff are in no fault whatsoever here, quite opposite I'd say they've made a great product and that's why I always wanted to share content about it. However, I never thought it would mean a flood of companies and people with so many questions, all of them assuming I'm getting paid by Beckhoff and demanding free support for all their Beckhoff related questions, and getting angry when I try to convince them that the course was made entirely for free.
Which leads me to the next point.

2.
Though 99.9% of the feedback has been positive, there has been plenty of hate. It's related to the fact that I made the PLC programming course for free. "You're destroying the automation industry as we will get flooded by new people now". It has even gotten so bad I've received death threats and people demanding me to delete the TwinCAT course from YouTube. It's a "I've paid thousands of $€£ for my knowledge, so everyone else should too!"-kind of thing. I thought the automation industry needed new ideas and new talent?

3.
My company has more work than we can handle, to the point where we can't take on all the work requests we receive. The amount of work lately has meant social media activity is down. It's hard to keep the balance of helping all our clients, and sharing as much of our knowledge as we can to give back to our wonderful industry. We'll be hiring more people!

With this being said, I've decided to take a pause from social media. I've paused my Patreon (thanks to all supporters!). In order for me to make free courses/content, the very minimum I have to get back is that it has to be fun, which it currently is not. I still want to continue bringing modern software engineering practices to the automation industry, and I will still continue to maintain the open source unit testing framework TcUnit and work on (free) training material for it.

I "just" have to find a way for it to be FUN to make PLC programming content again, but until I've found out how, I'll take a pause.

Thanks everyone!

2 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 64

Jakob Sagatowski

I've got hold on an early version of the Beckhoff CX9240 PLC. This is a brand new, soon-to-be released PLC. What's so special about it is that it's Beckhoff's first PLC running Linux as operating system. If you aren't comfortable running Windows or Tc/BSD, this might be a great option for you. This means that it's possible to combine all the applications that you can run on Linux with the real-time execution of your TwinCAT 3 PLC executables. What's not to like about that?

I'll be doing some evaluation of it, and if all goes well, I might end up ordering a larger quantity of them for a big client project. I've had several potential client projects NOT choosing Beckhoff because they didn't have a controller running Linux. Might the CX9240 change this? I'll make sure to share as much as possible here on YouTube.

9 months ago | [YT] | 133

Jakob Sagatowski

Do you use version control (Git, SVN, Mercurial, ...) for your PLC-projects?

1 year ago | [YT] | 4

Jakob Sagatowski

Working on something very exciting! This video was a lot of fun to work on.
As always, early access for my members and Patrons. And you'll get your name in the end credits as well ;-) www.patreon.com/sagatowski

1 year ago (edited) | [YT] | 13