August 10, 2024

Industrial Factory Mock Network

While I’m not fanatical about watches, I do enjoy them on a basic level. The way hundreds of different parts synchronize to achieve a single, straightforward goal of telling time reliably fascinates me. A modern roof tile plant is the same idea on a different scale, so I built a mock-up network to understand the choreography between controllers, robots, and monitoring software.

Goals

• Re-create the logical topology for a high-throughput roof tile plant.
• Stress-test how PLCs, industrial PCs, and robot controllers communicate under degraded links.
• Capture observability data so failures can be diagnosed quickly.

Stack

• Network Simulation: Cisco Packet Tracer + custom Python scripts for traffic shaping.
• Control Layer: Siemens PLCs (simulated), FANUC-style robot APIs, and a lightweight MQTT broker for sensor data.
• Monitoring: Grafana dashboards and Loki logs so I can replay incidents.

What I Learned

1. Bandwidth isn’t the problem—latency determinism is. Production lines care more about consistent update windows than raw throughput.
2. Layered redundancy beats one “big” backup. It’s safer to distribute small industrial PCs near each cell than to rely on a huge central failover server.
3. Good dashboards make debugging addictive. Once you visualize conveyor speeds, kiln temps, and robot arm duty cycles on the same board, correlations leap out.

Next Steps

• Swap Packet Tracer for an ns-3 model so I can inject more realistic wireless noise.
• Attach a soft PLC to real hardware and drive a scaled-down conveyor mock-up.
• Publish the config/scripts as a template for other manufacturing simulations.