hardella.com

What It Is

Hardella IDE is an integrated development environment for PLC development, with the site explicitly emphasizing “development convenience” and “code safety.” It mainly targets ST/IEC 61131-related programming, and has particular support for AM1808 PRU coprocessor scenarios, such as high-speed input/output, stepper motor control, encoder feedback, PWM, and fast counting on devices like ОВЕН ПЛК110 M02.

Core Features and Ecosystem

Its editing experience is close to that of a modern IDE: it can highlight errors while you write code, and detect issues with variables, parameters, and types. It supports Ctrl+Space autocompletion, and can automatically handle closing statements for IF, WHILE, and other structure blocks, as well as semicolons and indentation. The documentation also mentions capabilities such as finding variable usages and renaming variables. Hardella is based on JetBrains MPS and Mbeddr Platform, giving it strong potential for language extension, including embedding chart-like extensions directly in code.

For industrial control, Hardella can create PRU programs and generate auxiliary wrapper blocks for use with CoDeSys. It can also export ST programs in the *.exp format for CoDeSys 2.3. It includes built-in stepper motor control blocks; the PRU core can output controlled pulses up to 500kHz and supports high-speed IO logic with response times under 1 microsecond. The documentation examples cover blinking outputs, stepper motors, encoders, fixed-length material cutting, and other practical industrial scenarios.

Pricing and Limitations

The crawled text only shows that the website has a “How much does it cost?” entry, but does not provide specific pricing, licensing, payment methods, or open-source information. It is also worth noting that the page lists the downloadable version as 1.7.2, dated 2017-06-16, so the current level of maintenance activity is unclear. The functional limitations are also fairly explicit: loading programs to a PLC and online debugging have not yet been implemented; PRU programs can be tested in a simulator.

Pros, Cons, and Who It’s For

Its strengths are clear positioning, relatively deep support for AM1808 PRU high-speed control, and integration with CoDeSys, with documentation examples that are quite close to real industrial use cases. Its weaknesses are a narrow hardware/software compatibility scope, Russian-language materials that are not friendly to Chinese users, and a lack of public information on pricing, licensing, and support services. It is better suited to automation engineers who already have a CoDeSys/PLC background and need to experiment with fast IO or motion control, rather than as a general-purpose replacement for a PLC IDE.

Access from China

The crawled content does not make it possible to assess access quality from mainland China, so it is currently marked as unknown. If access or language becomes a barrier, alternatives to compare include CoDeSys 2.3, OpenPLC, Eclipse 4diac, or IDEs from specific PLC vendors.