What is plc-playground

The supporting idea

Learning involved failure. This is the main reason PLC-Playground has been developped. The idea is to give the learners a simulation framework to try aind fail developping PLC programs. In order to be as close as possible to the tools one is actually developping on, plc-playground simulation models are exposed behind well established communication protocols used in industrial automation. That way, one can simply program unsing his prefered tools and even program real PLCs to communicate with the simulated model.

How it works

In order to offer maximum portability, the simulation models are embedded on web pages and run by the browser. The main difficulty is that the browser execution is running in a sandbox with limitted and well established communication channels with the outside for security reasons. The implicatio of this is that the simulation model doesn't have access to raw IP sockets but only to the so called WebSockets. Most of the models on plc-playground uses ModbusTCP as a communication protocol with the simulated model which is based on TCP sockets. For that reason, it is necessary to use a proxy-bridge translating the websocket payload (ModbusTCP packets) to raw TCP sockets. This is the reason whis it is still necessary to setup some "software" on the client computer in order to have plc-playground to work.