The “Embedded Systems Programming” magazine (the predecessor of this Embedded.com website) used to publish several articles about state machines every year. The most popular such articles described ...

The interest in state machines started in the 1950s when George Moore and Edward Mealy published seminal papers on formal methods of designing digital circuits, which generate outputs based on the ...

An overview of the hardware and software components of PLCs and their programming languages. A programmable logic controller (PLC) is an industrial solid-state computer that monitors inputs and ...

Users program PLCs to define a series of actions that a machine will perform ... These routines access two common memory areas that together harness the PLC's state and synchronize using semaphores.

Some common pitfalls in machine safety have to do with ... Once you have designed your system, you must program it. Pay special attention to what the controller allows you to do in the safety code. A ...