SCADA side projects for technical depth
By Dimitri Lafleur
Working in SCADA means understanding how data moves from field instruments through protocol layers, scaling conversions, quality assessment, alarm evaluation, and eventually into historians and visualization layers.
Side projects let me model these flows from point lifecycle to HMI. Building simulators, protocol ingestion services, and small HMI bindings makes each layer visible.
What to inspect#
- Point definition and scaling behavior
- Quality code propagation
- Alarm evaluation logic (ROC, high/low thresholds)
- Historian compression and timestamp handling
- Protocol polling (Modbus, DNP3) with timeout/retry logic
These projects let me exercise the behaviors production SCADA systems depend on before they reach an operator.
Related work
Keep building SCADA systems.
The HMI pipeline and incident logic below model the same telemetry behaviors.