Build a working SCADA application on free software you download yourself: the gateway and the Designer, device connections and tags, UDTs that make one screen serve twenty machines, then Perspective views and bindings, alarming, and tag history, opened on a phone at the end of it.
About this course
Nine modules, an hour of material and an hour of hands-on work each, which is three days end to end.
This is the first course on this site you can do entirely on your own laptop. Ignition is a free download, it runs in trial mode with every module unlocked, and it ships device simulators that produce live changing data. No controller, no camera, no robot, no licence.
It starts with the idea the whole platform rests on: the gateway is the system and everything else is a window onto it. Then the Designer, device connections, and the tag structure that decides how much screen work you will be doing later, because a UDT and consistent naming are what let one view serve every machine on the plant.
The middle of the course is Perspective: views, components, and the binding chain that is invisible in a screenshot and is the single idea worth understanding properly. Then styles, embedded views and flex layout, so one application works on a control-room monitor and a phone.
It finishes with alarming and tag history, both taught as design problems rather than configuration screens. An alarm nobody acts on is noise, and history with the wrong compression is a record you cannot defend.
What you work through
The gateway as the system and clients as windows onto it, where SCADA sits above the PLC layer, how Ignition is licensed and modularised, and what a realistic architecture looks like.
Download Ignition from Inductive Automation, install the gateway, reach the web interface, and understand trial mode, including the two-hour reset that looks like a fault the first time.
The Designer Launcher, the three panes you will live in, creating a project, and the difference between saving a project and publishing it to running clients.
Connecting to a PLC over OPC UA or a native driver, the device simulators that let you work with no hardware, browsing to tags, and OPC against memory against expression tags.
Building a User Defined Type, parameters and indirection, instances, nesting and inheritance, and why the tag structure decides how much screen work you will do later.
Views and their shapes, the component tree, and the binding chain: tag, expression and property bindings, transforms, and bidirectional writes back to the PLC.
Style classes instead of per-component formatting, building one view and embedding it many times with parameters, flex containers, and a screen that works on a phone and a control room monitor.
Configuring alarms on tags and in UDTs, priorities and modes, the alarm journal, acknowledgement, notification pipelines, and designing an alarm somebody can act on.
Configuring history and choosing a sample mode, what analog compression does to your data, charting it in Perspective, and the gateway backup that is the whole system in one file.
Lab times are approximate: they are a guide to how long the hands-on part usually takes, not a limit. You can ask for more lab time whenever you need it.
Ignition is a free download from Inductive Automation and runs in trial mode with full functionality: every module unlocked, no expiry date, and a two-hour timer you reset with one click. The course guides you to download it yourself from inductiveautomation.com, under their terms. Nothing here supplies the software, a licence, or any project files from a paid Inductive Automation class.
Ignition also ships programmable device simulators, so the tags your screens read can be live and changing with no PLC on the desk. That combination is why this is the first course on this site whose hands-on hour needs no lab hardware at all. A laptop is genuinely enough, and you can rebuild everything here again tomorrow.
Ignition, Perspective and Inductive Automation are trademarks of Inductive Automation. They are used here only to say what the course covers. This course is independent: it is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced in partnership with Inductive Automation, and it is not their Core Class.