I took a career change last September and went from 21 years of telco as a digital tech to a medical manufacturing 'electronic mechanic'. I learned a little PLC 30 years ago, but have forgotten a lot of it. I am also learning a lot of arduino/ESP32 stuff while trying to make some new projects work. Any good resources out there? I tried some from Udemy, and while they may know their shit, the majority of the lectures are in broken-ass hindi/engrish. I am pretty good at taking a program apart (or at least I was back in the C64/apple II days) and changing a few things and figuring out what it does. Arduino IDE is making bang my head on the keyboard.

I personally prefer vscode and platformio to the arduino ide for programming micros - you’re really just writing C++ anyway.

Easiest thing to do is just google around for sample programs to do what you want to do and study them - you’ll find more for the esp8266 nodeMcu devices, they’re cheap and powerful.

Here's another vote for the combination of Microsoft VS Code and Platformio (as a smarter alternative to the Arduino IDE). While it's good to gain familiarity with the Arduino IDE (because it's in almost universal use, and therefore many of the resources that you find on the net or in books will assume that you're using the IDE), it is painful to use for anything other than simple sketches.

Some sources that you may find useful:

SparkFun https://sparkfun.com
and Adafruit https://adafruit.com have lots of tutorials and example code.

The 'Random Nerd Tutorials' site https://randomnerdtutorials.com/ is pretty decent - they have lots of tutorials and sample code (especially for ESP32 doing interesting things with web servers and remote control over WiFi) - while they will try to sell you a course or two, much or most of their tutorials are available for free.

Thanks, guys. I started to start back from the beginning to reintroduce myself to it all over again. Tweaking4all.com has some good resources for the arduino. Programming is programming, it's just learning a new syntax. The IDE is the part I'm trying to figure out right now. Smaw with PLC's. I can still 'think' in ladder logic, it's just getting used to AB's Studio 5000 and it's 42 varieties that irks me.

For the arduino, or rather ESP32, I am trying to look for an input on a pin, say 7, and then call a routine in FastLed or WLED to run a chase pattern (say CYLON) with the color RED. Then if there is no longer input on 7, but now is one on 8, then call routine for CYLON, but in GREEN. WLED is giving me more fits than FastLED at the moment, I don't know why. I'll keep plugging at it. Thank you.

-Joe-

Put it up on GitHub and post a link, someone probably knows enough about the libraries you’re using to help.

At a previous job the maint guys were using a program called Rockwell Factory Talk.  It looked like it had a visual interface

If you are dealing with traditional industrial PLCs...take a look at Automation Direct's Click PLC. If you buy one (basic models start under $100 USD) they have a pretty decent training series they give you access to which covers a lot of Ladder Logic and hardware configuration for specific setups.