Draft lesson — skeleton content pending the founder’s course outline (issue #32). The structure, URL and navigation are final; the text below is placeholder-quality.
When you press Start Lab in the student portal, two machines boot just for you:
- an IDE workstation — a full Windows machine running the CODESYS Development System, streamed to your browser tab, and
- a PLC — a real CODESYS soft-PLC runtime on its own Linux machine.
Alongside them, your machine — the 3D simulation — opens as a separate browser tab and connects live to your PLC. Nothing installs on your computer.
The one rule that matters
Save your projects under C:\Projects on the IDE. That folder follows you: it is
synced to durable storage when your lab stops and restored when it starts. Anything
saved elsewhere lives only for the current session.
Session lifecycle
Labs stop automatically when your session ends or goes idle — you never pay attention to a meter. Next lesson: a tour of the portal and your first session.