Range Lab
Where the writing comes from.
Our own bench of controllers and switches, and the standards everyone in this field reads.
The notes on this site are produced in Range Lab, not from client work. That is a rule, not a preference: it is the only way to publish about plant networks without publishing someone’s plant.
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How a note is made
Four steps, in this order.
- 01 · A question from the floorEvery note starts with something a plant manager or an engineer would actually ask: why the air gap stopped being real, what an inventory has to contain, why one switch can see the whole plant.
- 02 · The bench, not a clientWe answer it on our own equipment: controllers, switches, an HMI and the protocols a passive capture hears first in each industry. What we observe there is what we are allowed to describe.
- 03 · The public standardWhere a standard defines the term or the pattern, we paraphrase it and name it in the text. ISA/IEC 62443, NIST SP 800-82 and the Purdue reference model do most of the work.
- 04 · The ruleClient findings, asset counts and diagrams never appear, not even anonymised. If a number is not from a public source or our own bench, it is not published. Sample tables are labelled as samples.
Why publish at all
A method is not a moat.
The people who run it are. We publish the thinking so that an engineer can check it before a first meeting, and so that a plant manager can read a finding without a glossary. If you want the method applied rather than read about, that is what the contact page is for.
From the lab
Latest notes.
