Shadowing Practice: Going Online with a PLC, Uploading and Downloading Code! - Learn English Speaking with Video

Hello and welcome back to LeMaster Tech.

In today's video we'll be continuing our PLC programming educational series on the concepts of going online with a PLC

and we will then cover uploading and downloading, how to do it and what it means.

So as with this entire series I am using the Siemens PLC platform.

I'm using TIA Portal or Totally Integrated Automation Portal from Siemens to program my PLCs

but the concepts that we talk about in the latter schematic diagram code that

is going to be pretty universal to any PLC platform.

If you have specific questions about your platform, I've seen most of them, feel free to drop them in the comments below.

So as I mentioned in the beginning of the video, today we're going to be talking about going online with a PLC, what that means, the various different things that it means,

and the difference between downloading to a PLC, uploading from a PLC, and then going online without doing either of those

was online with my PLC

and I'm going to make a brand new project with you right here and I'm going to call it tutorial online.

and I'm going to create that project with you.

I'm gonna save the current project because that'll close out but That doesn't matter.

You could be connecting to a PLC for the first time right now and you have nothing online.

Now Siemens actually has a really nice feature.

Some other platforms do have it in a way.

I believe Studio 5000 by Alan Bradley, as well as the Bekoff TwinCat platform, all have ways to detect a PLC that you're connected to.

So in terms of my computer,

I know it's physically Don't worry about the specifics of what I just said.

The really cool thing about TIA Portal is it actually gives you a way to browse available devices.

But even if it didn't, Rockwell has RS links.

TwinCat has the like router, ADS router configuration tool, Bekoff does.

And then every other PLC platform that I've worked on, Mitsubishi, Omron, they have some way to basically enter an IP address and discover a PLC there.

serial cable and use serial like RS -232 or RS -485, but we're gonna assume you have a PLC that you can access via Ethernet.

Let's take a look at how we can go online with this PLC without even having a backup of the program.

I will say this all gets a lot easier to go online with a device

if you do have a backup of the PLC program, but a lot of times, assuming it's not super locked down with passwords and restrictions, you can actually just get a lot of information about the PLC.

PLC right off the PLC.

So in the top I'm going to go to online

and almost every PLC IDE has some version of go online menu

and we can upload the device as a new station hardware and software.

We point at our ethernet adapter and we hit start search

and it actually is just browsing its ethernet connections for any discoverable device on the same VLAN or virtual network

420 69 169 nice we're gonna hit upload and see

if it works now if this was a system you got from a vendor

or a system that's been in a factory forever and you just inherited the role as a person responsible for it.

There may be usernames, passwords, credentials that you have to enter there to be able to upload it.

But honestly, most PLC programmers don't prefer to do it that way.

So there's a decent chance you'll be able to upload any PLC that you connect to just as a new device.

And that's pretty cool because now we have the program blocks which show the code for it.

So I can go to main and I can see, oh, there's a routine called increment running on this PLC.

if I look at what my PLC is doing, the digital output lights are incrementing one at a time on the front of the PLC, which tells me I should look at this routine increment.

And so you notice this button at the top of Tia Portal says go online now

because there's a PLC with an IP address added to our device.

So if I hit go online,

Tia Portal specifically has a few different color styles from TwinCat and Omron and Mitsubishi,

but generally speaking every PLC platform has some way of going online, some indication that you've successfully gone online,

and then some tool in the case of Siemens it's these glasses with a little play button for live monitoring.

And live monitoring the code is really useful because it shows you what's going on.

I can look at this little routine

that's just counting 0 to 9 and again this correlates exactly to what I'm seeing on the PLC.

So generally speaking when you go online with a PLC you don't always have to upload

or download but it's more of a live viewing environment.

If you have a backup of the PLC so now

that I have this code I'm gonna go ahead and save it

and if I close Tia portal out completely and then reopen it and then

that stored all that information about our PLC and the code

that we pulled off of the PLC by uploading

and I'm able to just go in here and and immediately hit the go online button.

If I didn't have the go online button,

you can usually use extended go online or older versions of Allen Bradley PLCs had who active go online,

where you can check for available IP addresses and devices.

And you can see all the devices available to you that you're connected to through a variety of drivers, whether it's serial, ethernet, profinet, whatever.

And then you can check for your device, see if it's connected, that way as well.

Okay, and we can once again see that we're online, we can get back into the increment code and we can live monitor it.

And again, the thing to speed recap what we've done

so far is uploading generally refers to pulling the code off of the controller into a file on your computer

that you can read.

Going online is generally just thought of as live connecting to the device for monitoring of status.

So there's going online and there's uploading.

Now let's talk about downloading

and downloading bold letters is the dangerous thing to be very careful about doing

because downloading is what you do when you change the code on the controller.

at a time it's just going to turn half my outputs on

and then the other half of the outputs on like a flip -flop circuit very similar to increment

but all I have to do to make

that happen is I have to go to main

and then I need to say well main

which is sort of my like master routine

that calls all the sub functions now I want main to call flip -flop

and not increment and you can see that even though shows unaccepted changes in a different way.

So does every platform.

And now if I want to download to the controller, I can hit the down arrow, I can go to online and I can hit the download to device button.

You have to be very careful when you do downloads because

Normally a PLC is not in a nice clean bench setup like I have it here.

It's usually in an industrial control cabinet and it's usually controlling real world outputs.

And you're immediately changing how they will react.

So most of the time before you download to a controller, you want to power that device into a completely safe and idle state.

But what you can see is now that it's gone solid green again.

the two count variables I have set up.

So the flip flop is working really well.

Now that I've gotten rid of increment, if I turn this one on, you'll see that it's all grayed out because nothing's calling it.

It's not a live function anymore.

Okay, and then you also don't have to do downloads exactly the way I did where you do them online, you can go fully offline.

And you can change something about the code like right now it's changing between

um position one

and position two every one second i could change this to just a hard -coded uh like five seconds

and i can download

100

and i'm completely offline right now i can download without being

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online those two do not have to be the same thing

102

but it can be very helpful to do online downloads anytime you're not changing physical hardware

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because you're acutely aware of the current state of the device and you can immediately monitor how it changes when it changes.

104

So now that we've downloaded, I'll hit that monitor again, it'll go online again, and it'll show us this counter counting up to five seconds.

105

So you can do downloads from an offline state or an online state because in either of those scenarios, you're making the call as the engineer or programmer to say,

106

I don't care what code was on that device, take this code and now this is your brains.

107

This is also why before you do a download on a live system, you should almost always start by doing an upload,

108

making sure you have a backup of the most recent code that you're viewing.

109

Save it as underscore old.

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Like right now I'm live with this code so I can go to save.

111

I can do project save as I could say tutorial online.

112

backup or something like that and and I can hit save.

113

Okay and now that I've saved off a backup copy I could go ahead

114

and make changes and delete stuff and change stuff.

115

But again you have to understand anytime you download to a PLC you are changing how

116

that PLC is going to command stuff and so you need to be incredibly careful.

117

You need to make sure production is aware of any changes

118

that you're making and downloading is the thing that you want to be extremely trained to be able to do.

119

Or you have a nice bench to f around and find out as they say.

120

So again, uploading is pulling code off of a PLC.

121

It's generally thought of as quite safe.

122

It's a good way to get a backup.

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It's a good way to make sure that you have a recent version of whatever code is running on your device.

124

Going online is live monitoring your code.

125

It doesn't necessarily refer to making changes.

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There are ways to go online

127

read only so you can't even make changes

128

and that's a really great tool for like maintenance sometimes

129

and support technicians and folks who don't write code

130

but they need to understand what's happening

131

and then download is the big careful safe you're pushing changes to the controller

132

so you really need to be aware of what you're doing

133

so I hope that all made sense again even

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if you don't program in TIA portal with the Siemens platform these concepts are quite

135

if you have any questions about what you saw in this video today.

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And let me know what programming or automation and controls concepts you want to see next on the channel.

137

Thanks for watching and see you next time.

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Bye.

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Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

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