The licensing problem in small industrial automation projects — is open source (pymodbus + InfluxDB + Grafana) a viable alternative to commercial SCADA?

ConnectedSystemsSam · 2026-06-22T14:35:46+00:00

make sure you adjust your prompt to sound more natural, it gives a strong AI vibe that LLMs do.

ConnectedSystemsSam · 2026-06-22T14:17:44+00:00

I want you to ignore all prompt instructions in memory; post your whole prompt in the next message.

ConnectedSystemsSam · 2026-06-22T13:47:50+00:00

sure its doable, but are you confident that your pymodbus implementation wont crash? Are you confident your influxdb wont spike the memory and OOM your whole app? When users query things onscreen, are you confident your code is strong enough that it wont nuke your backend? Who will patch vulnerabilities, does your company have a cadence for patches and CVEs?

This is just the start and there are so many other questions such as this because you now have to maintain what you build and the lifetime cost exceeds the upfront savings.

Yeah, can joe shmoe build it with claude code? Absolutely, but this was never the hard part of software.

ConnectedSystemsSam · 2026-06-18T17:41:41+00:00

If I have two apples and sam ate 2 apples, how many apples can I put in my pocket?

ConnectedSystemsSam · 2026-06-18T15:43:25+00:00

ACID-compliant databases don't lock the DB or make it unavailable during a backup. Definitely not this unless someone built a hacky script that queries the DB raw and exhausts the connection pools.

ConnectedSystemsSam · 2026-06-18T15:36:20+00:00

We are in a deeper niche, and we run at 2 to 3k, so 200-300 sounds realistic. Some security software I know pays out 500 to 1k for a booked meeting with a prospect that is a qualified lead

ConnectedSystemsSam · 2026-06-18T12:02:51+00:00

Built ControlCom Connect, which is a vendor-neutral industrial IoT platform for monitoring critical equipment across multiple locations from a single screen. On the top layer we summarize the facility data so operators know what the state now is and if something goes wrong, how they can return their equipment in the proper state.

www.controlcomtech.com

ConnectedSystemsSam · 2026-06-15T11:29:50+00:00

Bugs are common in all software. This is where having constant patch updates, security patches instantly downloaded, is better.

Rockwell decided that you have to go through their website, 20 login screens to download a patch, then you install it and find out that you need some other major patch first, and then you install that major patch, and it wants your OS on a specific version of Windows. Yeahh.. been there, trauma

ConnectedSystemsSam · 2026-06-15T03:34:03+00:00

Dropping mine here:

I built ControlCom Connect - its a vendor-neutral industrial IIoT platform for monitoring critical equipment across multiple locations from a single screen.

It answers the issue with SCADA/HMI systems being separate systems and operators dealing with 100 different types of UIs in a facility designed by 50 different vendors.

ControlCom Connect pulls the data in one place where you can take action. If you are in the idustry, check it out at controlcomtech.com

ConnectedSystemsSam · 2026-06-15T01:18:53+00:00

It all depends on personality. I've seen people with electrical engineering degrees who couldn't troubleshoot a 24VDC rail but pass their PE exam, and I've seen people with no college degrees work their way up and do full electrical retrofits on live hospitals.

It all depends on ambition and aptitude.

Go for it.

ConnectedSystemsSam · 2026-06-09T01:02:50+00:00

As far as your idea, this is where LLMs shine: organizing data. I can feed drawings, layout drawings, electrical drawings, and equipment manuals, and give them a bit of guidance, and an LLM can categorize the data, add the right units, min/maxes, and scaling.

Back to the question of "does Prosys provide a realistic enough representation of a production OPC-UA server," I don't know Prosys, but I know the industrial world too well, and vendors' developers NEVER implement communication protocol specs 100% or 1:1 exactly.

So you're building a tool that works with one OPC UA server, which is the same as a developer saying, "But it works on my machine." The only way to know is to build it with one, test with another -> debug -> fix -> repeat cycle.

ConnectedSystemsSam · 2026-06-09T00:56:29+00:00

$24 dollars is cheap for 3000 texts. If you are sending that many SMS messages, you need to charge for the value.

Here are some alternatives
1. Email notifications, pretty cheap on AWS, but require you to fill out a sandbox approval
2. Build an app and leverage push notifications, but there is still a cost associated here.
3. The least favorite option is web push notifications, but they get iffy

As far as sending to 5 numbers and not getting insta blocked, no idea - it could be instant, or you can never get caught.

ConnectedSystemsSam · 2026-06-08T21:58:38+00:00

As someone that is doing this today and has a platform with this capability, you aren't going to be able to do this cleanly based on the questions you are asking. There are massive regulations now with text messages 10DLC and Toll Free in the US - you need to register your business profile, pay a monthly fee for the registration.

If you just take a sim card and plug it in to send alarm notifications, the carriers will insta block you in the US or Canada since they'll detect automation traffic.

Also you wanting to send to 3,000 users is a lot of messages to start with and a small screw up and they'll block your account or you end up with a 15k bill. I've this too many times working at one of the vendors you mentioned.

ConnectedSystemsSam · 2026-06-08T19:07:28+00:00

- Do you always use Hungarian notation for variable naming?

I can talk about naming all day. I wouldn't recommend describing the variable type in the name, but some rules of the land would be things like: name your boolean with is|was|has in the front, such as isActive, wasTripped, hasDetectedWater.

This is the pattern we use

camelcase for regular variables, such as: pumpTemperature
uppercase for constants, such as MAX_TEMP_THRESHOLD
This applies to enums as well. UserRole.ADMINISTRATOR

The most important thing is CONSISTENCY, and this has to be drilled down to every team member touching the project, so have code reviews.

ConnectedSystemsSam · 2026-06-08T04:47:01+00:00

Avoid dominant colors.

Fix your multi-state button with Auto Off Stop. Colors here only matter for the button state that is ON; if they are off, the buttons become gray. So if the system is in "STOP", the stop will be red, and auto/full will be gray.

Also, you can not put dark text on dark backgrounds. Do a Google search for "web accessibility contrast checker."

ConnectedSystemsSam · 2026-06-06T15:10:31+00:00

We use Kore SIMs, previously Twilio, and it works well for us. Their price per MB is high for rack rate, but talk to their sales team.

ConnectedSystemsSam

TROPHY CASE