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Interesting
question, that if I understand correctly it is asking about the ability to copy
a developed IOControl developed strategy and use it with or without the programmer’s
permission.
It’s
important to understand that PACControl is really a complier. After developing your program in the config
mode, you need to compile it and then download it to the PAC controller. What’s running is the compiled final code and
not the original source code that you see in PAC control. It is not possible for this compiled code can
be uploaded to the PC again. I think this answers your question.
It is also
important to understand that if you lose your source program that you developed
under PAC Control, (either deleting it, PC virus or hard disk failure) the
complied code running on the controller will not help you. If you want to make any changes you would
have to develop a new program from nothing!
You should
be aware of a configurable option in PACControl that will save an archived
version of your program to the battery backed ram on the controller. This gets downloaded just after the compiled version
of the program. If you configure this
option (File>Strategy Options>Archive Strategy to Disk & During
Download Archive Strategy and save to Flash) then PACControl automatically
creates a backup copy which can later be uploaded to a PC and reused for other
controllers. So if you do not want anyone
to reuse your program then do not configure this option!
For your
information, there is an option under PACManager to copy the IO configuration image
from the IO side of a PAC controller to a PC image file or another identical
I/O unit. (PAC Manager>Tools>Import/Copy
IO Unit). But this only makes a copy of
the IO memory map functionality (Things you see and configure in PAC Manager) and
does not include the control engine program developed under PAC Control.
If the end customer requests a contractual backup copy of
the application software that has been developed, there is a useful option in PAC
Control to create a final control engine download file (format .cdf) that
creates everything that would normally be downloaded and puts it into a single
file format. This file cannot then be viewed or modified under PACControl. This can be directly downloaded to any controller
using PAC Terminal without ever needing PACControl or the original program.
To avoid your
program being used downloaded to another PAC controller you could check the controllers
MAC Address from within your program (Read
Numeric Table from I/O Unit Memory Map, Address
FFFFF F030 002E Integer 6 Bytes) to check that your program is running
on the CPU you developed it for. However
in the case of CPU failure, the program could not be directly downloaded to a
replacement CPU as the MAC address would not match.
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