I was wondering if there is a way, and what is the correct way, of creating PLC templates. By default in TwinCAT you are provided with “Empty” and “Standard” projects – empty one is useless since it does not even include basic libraries and once you add task reference you start to scratch your head with all the errors (Tc3_Module needs to be added manually for tasks to work).

I took a dive to see how TwinCAT creates the templates and went ahead and created a PLC template by modifying existing TwinCAT files as well as adding my own files to achieve my goal. Long story short, here is the result:

As mentioned, I had to fiddle with files located in C:TwinCAT3.1ComponentsPlcPlcTemplates1.0.0.0Plc Templates, which I am not a fan of, and I assume once I update TwinCAT all these folder are deleted and contents will be lost, thus requring a script to do this again on do it manually. Has anyone created PLC templates before, or do people just do “Add existing item” and have a project defined there?