Delta PLC training — WPLSoft, ISPSoft, AS-series

Delta is the controller you will meet on a Taiwanese-built packaging line in a Johannesburg South industrial park, an irrigation pump house in the Karoo running off a generator and a small panel, or an OEM machine that landed in a sea container with a Mandarin wiring schedule and a bilingual HMI on the cabinet door. If you are starting Delta PLC training in 2026 and you want a practical view of what to learn, in what order, and which marketing slides to ignore, this is the page. We program DVP, AS and AH controllers daily, we run WPLSoft and ISPSoft on the same engineering laptop, and we are not a Delta authorised training partner. We are an independent training site that thinks the partner courseware is mispriced for self-funded learners and that most of the YouTube alternatives skip the parts that matter when you are crouched in front of an AS228T-A with a comms light flashing red.

Where Delta shows up in SA

The Delta install base in South Africa is concentrated and specific. Small to mid OEM machines are the largest cluster — packaging lines, labellers, case-erectors, shrink-wrappers, small extrusion skids and benchtop test rigs that arrived from Taiwanese, Chinese and occasionally Korean machine builders during the long boom of imported equipment between 2010 and 2024. Building automation is a second cluster: HVAC plant rooms in commercial blocks in Sandton and Cape Town CBD, lift-shaft pressurisation panels, and chiller-house sequencing on shopping-centre roofs run a surprising amount of DVP and AS-series in the background. Irrigation and rural water schemes are a third cluster — borehole pump control, reservoir level sequencing, and centre-pivot irrigation panels on commercial farms in the Free State and Mpumalanga lean Delta hard, mostly because the panel BOM is half the price of a Siemens equivalent and the local sub-distributor keeps spares on the shelf in Centurion.

Where you will not see Delta much is the heavy-process side of the country. Petrochem leans Siemens and Honeywell, water utilities lean Siemens and Modicon, mining beneficiation is Siemens with pockets of Allen-Bradley, and large-scale FMCG packaging halls lean Allen-Bradley and Siemens. Delta sits in the gaps where price matters more than name, where the integrator is a small two-person shop rather than a multinational EPC, and where the spec was written by the OEM who imported the machine rather than by a corporate engineering standard. That is not a small market — there are several thousand DVP and AS-series controllers across the country — but it is a brand you will earn a living on by working at the price-sensitive end of the integrator world rather than by chasing the next Siemens TIA Portal contract on a refinery turnaround.

A practical implication for a learner choosing a brand. Delta is the right call for OEM machine builders chasing a R250k panel BOM, not for greenfield petrochem. If you are starting your own integrator shop on a budget, building OEM machines for export, or working maintenance on imported Asian equipment, Delta will pay your rent. If you are a generalist looking for the broadest job market across the country, learn Siemens or Allen-Bradley first and pick up Delta as a second or third brand once you can read a fault loop without flinching.

The hardware family

Delta sells a deeper range of controllers than most engineers realise, and the local install base is a snapshot of about twenty years of product evolution. You only need a small subset to be useful on the work that actually exists in South Africa.

DVP series — the legacy compact line. This is the brick-style line that built the brand. The older DVP-SS, DVP-SX, DVP-SE and DVP-EX (model numbers like DVP14SS11R2, DVP20SX211S, DVP12SE11R, DVP10EX11R) are still all over the country on packaging machines, irrigation panels and small standalone skids built between roughly 2008 and 2018. The mid-range DVP-SX2 and DVP-EH3 (DVP24SX211T, DVP60EH3, DVP80EH3, DVP-EH3-L) added more I/O, faster scan and a better instruction set. The whole DVP line is brick-style: CPU and base I/O in a single body, with extension blocks (DVP08SP11R, DVP16SP11R, DVP04AD-S, DVP04DA-S) that clip onto the right-hand side. No backplane, no chassis, no rack power supplies — just a DIN-rail module and a 24 V DC feed. Programming is via WPLSoft.

AS series — the modern mid-range. AS200, AS300 and AS500 are the current line. AS228T-A, AS228R-A, AS228P-A on the smaller side; AS320T-B, AS324MT-A, AS332T-A, AS332P-A on the AS300 side; AS500 for the higher-end builds with built-in EtherCAT motion. The AS-series uses a slot-based system: CPU on the left, expansion modules (AS04DA-A for analog out, AS04AD-B for analog in, AS08AD-C for thermocouple, AS16AM10N-A for digital input, AS16AN02T-A for transistor output) clipped to the right on a local bus. Programming is via ISPSoft. AS-series is the platform you should default to for any new Delta build today — it is the modern story and the one that is still getting active firmware updates.

AH series — the high-end modular. AHCPU500-EN, AHCPU510-EN, AHCPU530-EN, AHCPU560-EN sit in a base unit (AHBP04M1-5A for four slots, AHBP06M1-5A for six, AHBP08M1-5A for eight, AHBP12M1-5A for twelve) with a separate power supply (AHPS05-5A, AHPS15-5A) and dedicated I/O cards (AH16AM10N-5A, AH16AN01T-5A, AH08AD-5C, AH04DA-5A). AH-series is aimed at process and larger machine work where the AS-series I/O count or scan time falls short. The local install base is thin — most SA Delta sites that need that scale buy Siemens or AB instead — but you will meet AH-series on the occasional larger OEM line and on a few water-utility upgrade projects.

VFDs — a major Delta sub-business. Delta is a serious drives manufacturer in addition to being a controller manufacturer, and the drives outsell the PLCs by a wide margin in SA. VFD-MS300 (the compact general-purpose drive, sizes from 0.4 kW to 22 kW) is the workhorse on packaging conveyors and small pumps. VFD-C2000 (the heavy-duty open-loop drive, sizes from 0.75 kW to 450 kW) sits on bigger pumps and HVAC fans. VFD-CH2000 (the closed-loop heavy-duty crane drive) shows up on hoists and gantries. VFD-E and VFD-S are older legacy lines you will still meet on brownfield panels. The drives talk to the PLCs over Modbus RTU on RS-485 (the default on DVP and AS), or over CANopen and EtherCAT on the higher-end AS and AH platforms. Knowing the drive side of the Delta catalogue is non-optional if you are doing maintenance work on imported machines.

Networks. Delta supports Modbus RTU and Modbus TCP across the whole line, CANopen on AS-series and above, EtherCAT on AS500 and AH-series with a motion CPU, and DeviceNet on the older Q-style cards. There is no proprietary Mitsubishi-CC-Link-IE-Field equivalent and no proprietary Profinet equivalent — Delta plays the open-standards game and lets the hardware compete on price. The official product catalogue and downloads sit at deltaww.com/en-US/products/PLCs/ALL.

WPLSoft vs ISPSoft

This is where the Delta engineering experience is split, and the split mirrors the hardware split. WPLSoft is the IDE for the legacy DVP family. ISPSoft is the IDE for AS-series and AH-series. The two products do not overlap. If your client sites run a mix — and most SA integrators on the Delta side do — you install both, and you switch context based on which CPU is in front of you.

WPLSoft is the older, simpler tool. It launched in the early 2000s, the UI shows its age, the project file format is binary and fights version control, and the ladder editor has the keyboard shortcuts and double-click conventions of an early-2000s Windows application. It still works fine. Most SA shops still run WPLSoft daily because the DVP install base is not going anywhere — the hardware is reliable, the cabinets are paid for, the spares are stocked, and a brick-style controller swap-out from DVP-EH3 to AS228T is the kind of project that gets quoted, deferred and forgotten about until the CPU dies. WPLSoft is a free download from the Delta site. No licence, no nag screen, no online activation. You install it and it runs.

ISPSoft is a better IDE on every axis that matters. It is built on a more modern Windows codebase, the project tree behaves like a current IDE rather than a 2002 MDI window, the symbol table is a real symbol table with structured data types and arrays, and the language support covers the IEC 61131-3 family properly — LD, ST, SFC, FBD and CFC. It is also a free download. No licence, no nag screen. The free-download story is the single biggest practical difference between Delta and the bigger vendors — there is no GX-Works-style USD 4,500-per-seat barrier between you and the IDE, and a self-funded learner can install ISPSoft on a personal laptop on a Sunday afternoon and start writing code by dinner. That matters more than the marketing slides admit.

Languages and addressing

Delta supports the IEC 61131-3 family on AS-series and AH-series — ladder diagram, structured text, sequential function chart, function block diagram and continuous function chart. The IEC standard itself is the cross-vendor reference for language semantics: iec.ch/standards/iec-61131-3. The older DVP family in WPLSoft is mostly LD with some embedded SFC and a Delta-specific instruction-list view; structured text is not properly supported on legacy DVP, and you write everything in ladder.

The addressing model on Delta will feel familiar to anyone coming from Mitsubishi, because the device-memory scheme is almost identical. The core letters are X for input bits, Y for output bits, M for auxiliary memory bits, D for data registers (16-bit by default, paired for 32-bit), T for timers and C for counters. There are more — S for step relays, B for link bits, W for link words, SR and SM for special registers and special bits — but those six are the ones you will use most of the time. The shared device-memory heritage with Mitsubishi is not an accident: the Taiwanese controller industry grew up programming Mitsubishi FX clones in the 1990s, and the addressing convention stuck when Delta launched their own line.

The catch on legacy DVP is the same as on Mitsubishi Q-series: timer and counter numbering is allocated, not symbolic. You write T0, T1, T2 as actual addresses and you keep track of which numbers are in use across the whole project. Allocate T0 to T99 to one task, T100 to T199 to another, and write a memory map in a spreadsheet. ISPSoft on AS-series adds a symbolic-tag layer that hides most of this, but the underlying device memory still works the same way and you will fall through the abstraction the first time you need to reference a timer's elapsed value from a different POU.

A small ladder-and-ST snippet showing addressing. A start-stop motor with a thermal overload, written for an AS228T in ISPSoft syntax — sealed-in start X0.0, stop X0.1, overload X0.2, output Y0.0, an internal seal-in coil M0, and a run-hours counter using a 1-second timer T0:

(* sealed-in start with overload *)
M0 := (X0.0 OR M0) AND NOT X0.1 AND NOT X0.2;
Y0.0 := M0;
(* hours-run counter, 1 sec base via T0 *)
IF M0 THEN
    T0(IN := TRUE, PT := T#1S);
    IF T0.Q THEN
        D100 := D100 + 1;   (* seconds running *)
    END_IF;
END_IF;

That is the same pattern you would write on a Siemens S7-1200 or a Mitsubishi FX5U, with different addresses on the front and the same timer-instance idea underneath. If you can read that snippet without getting confused by the M0 versus Y0.0 versus T0 letter scheme, you are most of the way through Delta PLC training already.

Built-in simulator

ISPSoft ships with a "Simulator" run mode that emulates the AS-series CPU directly inside the IDE. You build your project, hit the simulator button, and the IDE swaps from "online to a real CPU" mode to "online to a virtual CPU" mode without changing your project file. You can single-step, force device values, watch the device-memory window and trigger inputs by clicking a virtual switch. It is decent. It is lighter on system resources than Siemens PLCSIM Advanced, lighter than Mitsubishi GX Simulator2, and it boots faster than either. The trade-off is that the network simulation is partial — Modbus TCP works inside the simulator, EtherCAT motion does not, and CANopen drive control is a stub — and the I/O scan timing is faster than a real controller, so any code that depends on tight scan-time interactions will behave subtly differently on hardware.

For a learner, the ISPSoft simulator is genuinely accessible because both ISPSoft and the simulator are free downloads. There is no paid licence between you and a working simulated AS-series CPU. WPLSoft has a similar simulator mode for legacy DVP, and that is also free. This is the part of the Delta story that the bigger vendors will not match — you can be building real ISPSoft projects against a simulated AS300 inside an evening. The catch is that you still need to know what to build, in what order, and that is the gap our browser simulator fills.

Where our browser simulator fits

We are not the ISPSoft simulator. We do not pretend to be. We give you something different and complementary. Our simulator runs in a browser tab, with no installation, on any laptop or Chromebook with a current Chrome or Firefox. The scan engine matches IEC 61131-3 semantics — rung-by-rung evaluation, instance data persistence on function block calls, deterministic timer behaviour, and the same race conditions you would see on a real controller when scan order matters.

What you get from us is ladder logic reflexes, IEC 61131-3 semantics, and pattern fluency. Delta-specific instruction set — the high-speed pulse output instructions (DPLSY, DPLSV, DPLSR on legacy DVP, the equivalent motion FBs on AS-series), the Delta-specific motion control instructions on AS500 with EtherCAT, the SR-flag conventions for special status bits, and the Modbus master-and-slave instructions for talking to VFD-MS300 drives — you learn inside ISPSoft and WPLSoft against a simulated CPU. We do not replace that. We build the underlying programming brain so the Delta-specific layer takes weeks instead of months. By the time you sit in front of ISPSoft for the first time, you already know how a TON behaves when the rung goes false mid-timing, how a sealed-in start-stop reads on the input scan, and what an SR latch does when set and reset rungs fight on the same scan. You can mentally translate the M0 aux bit on a Delta rung to the M0.0 flag on a Siemens rung to the Conveyor.Run tag on a Rockwell rung — and that translation skill is what makes a multi-brand integrator hireable.

The wiring track and sensor school bridge the gap. The wiring track shows you a labelled AS16AM10N-A input card and walks you through wiring a 24 V DC sourcing sensor, a dry-contact pushbutton, and a 4-20 mA transmitter through an AS04AD-B analogue channel. The sensor school covers the 22 sensor types most common on local packaging and irrigation panels, with the engineering-unit scaling you would set inside a Delta function block.

Cert path

Delta runs technical training in South Africa via its local distributor network and the regional Delta Industrial Automation office. The footprint is smaller than Siemens or Rockwell — there is a Johannesburg office, a sub-distributor in Cape Town, and a partner network of integrators who run occasional product-launch sessions. The partner courses tend to be one-day or two-day product-focused workshops rather than the four-or-five-day structured programmes you would sit on the bigger brands. Cost is in the range of free (when bundled with a hardware purchase) to roughly R6 000 to R12 000 for a paid place. The certificate is partner-issued and carries weight inside the Delta integrator world but does not have the same brand recognition as a Siemens SCE Programmer cert or a Rockwell CCAP outside that world.

The honest take. The Delta cert ecosystem is less formal than Siemens or Rockwell. There is no Delta equivalent of the Siemens SCE programme, no equivalent of Rockwell's tiered CCAP / CCST / CCAP-Process structure. If your goal is a credential that survives a CV scan in a generalist integrator interview, the Delta partner cert will not carry the weight you want. For a self-funded learner who wants a vendor-neutral cert that travels internationally, the ISA CCST (Certified Control Systems Technician) remains the better self-funded option. CCST is recognised by employers everywhere from Saudi Arabia to Australia, the exam is around USD 600, and it is brand-agnostic. Build the reflexes on our browser simulator first, sit a Delta partner workshop when an employer is funding it or when a product launch is on offer, and pursue CCST if you want a portable credential that is not tied to one vendor's marketing budget. There is a useful overview of Delta Electronics' history and product scope at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Electronics for context.

What we don't claim

This page is going to be honest about what we are and aren't. We are not a Delta-authorised training provider. We have no commercial relationship with Delta Electronics or Delta Industrial Automation. We do not represent the official partner network, we do not issue partner-equivalent certificates, and we do not have access to Delta proprietary courseware. Our completion certificates are course-level only and have no regulatory standing — not in South Africa and not internationally. We are not SAQA-registered and we are not nationally accredited. We have not pursued QCTO accreditation and we are not MerSETA-accredited either.

What we are: an independent simulator and curriculum that helps you build the reflexes you need before you spend time on partner workshops or sit a CCST exam. The vendor IDE, the simulated CPU, and the partner workshop are separate purchases (or in Delta's case, free downloads) from a separate vendor. We are honest brokers. If you specifically need a SETA-aligned learnership for B-BBEE skills development reasons, we are not the right product. If you want ISPSoft-ready and WPLSoft-ready reflexes before you install the IDE and stare at an empty project tree, we are exactly the right product.

How to start

Five steps. Sandbox first — open the simulator, drag a contact and a coil, write your name across the screen in rungs. Then a start-stop with the Delta addressing equivalence in your head — write the classic three-wire control with a sealed-in start, a stop button and an output coil, and consciously translate the simulator's address scheme to a Delta X0.0 / Y0.0 / M0 view as you go. Treat M0 as the equivalent of a Siemens M0.0 flag or an Allen-Bradley Motor.Run_Internal aux tag — same role, different syntax. Then a sealed-in motor with overload — add a thermal overload contact and learn what a "field check" interlock pattern looks like before you write one on a real AS228T project. Then a small sequencer using SFC — five-step bottle-filling cycle, with timer behaviour and step-transition logic that maps directly to SFC steps in ISPSoft. Then a Delta-style instruction equivalence walkthrough — take a working DVP project written in WPLSoft, translate the legacy ladder rungs to ISPSoft on AS-series, and feel for the first time what the migration path between the two halves of the Delta catalogue actually costs.

Free tier first — no credit card. Spend a weekend on the sandbox and the first few lessons. If the format works, move to Basic at $12 a month. Most learners reach the start of the brand-specific Delta content in three to four weeks of part-time practice.