Field-tested walkthroughs for the unglamorous parts of industrial automation: getting devices to talk, keeping data honest, and making it all survive a power cut.
PLC Networking
Modbus TCP, PROFINET, EtherNet/IP and S7 comms. Register maps, gateways, watchdogs and the addressing traps that eat afternoons.
Industrial Protocols
What actually travels on the wire. OPC UA, MQTT Sparkplug B, Modbus framing – and how to choose between them without a vendor pitch.
Edge and Containers
Docker, Node-RED and Telegraf on the plant floor. Running industrial software with version control, restarts and no surprises.
SCADA and Visualisation
Ignition, FUXA, Grafana and Home Assistant. Turning tags into screens operators trust at three in the morning.
Data and Historians
InfluxDB, PostgreSQL, retention policies and time-series modelling. Keeping plant data useful a year after you collect it.
Lab Notes
What is running in this lab right now, what broke this week, and what it taught us. Less polished, more honest.
Latest guides
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Connect Two PLCs Over Modbus TCP: A Practical Guide
Two PLCs, one switch, no SCADA in the middle. A complete walkthrough: register map, server and client configuration, laptop verification, watchdog and the traps that eat afternoons.
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Two Nodes, One Stack: an IIoT Homelab Architecture
Two container hosts, one hypervisor, one design rule: everything survives a reboot without human hands. Why two nodes The VirtualBox node carries the automation wing — Node-RED, n8n, Ignition Edge, FUXA, soft-PLCs…
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How My Homelab Got an AI Operator
In one day, this homelab went from manually administered to conversationally operated. Here is how — and what broke along the way. Five interfaces to everything The lab now exposes five MCP…