Grafcet to Arduino : Edit and Upload Grafcets on an Arduino Boards

Abstract

This paper deals with the design and implementation of a Grafcet editor and simulator, allowing to generate a directly executable program on an Arduino board from a Grafcet. This work is intended to be a solution to help carrying out automation laboratory exercises; and, more generally, to offer a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) development environment allowing to obtain low-cost PCLs based on Arduino modules, from the Grafcet formalism. Arduino boards are one of the most accessible and easy-to-use microcontroller boards and Grafcet is a well-known and essential model in the world of automated systems. All these reasons motivated the choice of these technologies. Finally, to achieve the set objectives, we started from a free Grafcet editor JGrafchart, developed in Java and that we adapted by including, amongst other things, the code generator for Arduino.