About Shopfloor
An industrial technology index and original publication — what it covers, how it works, and who maintains it.
Use Shopfloor to understand industrial automation and work through practical plant-floor questions. It brings together technical explainers, calculators, learning paths and worksheets for engineers, technicians and learners working with PLCs, industrial networks, manufacturing systems and OT security.
How to use it
- Choose a task. Calculate production performance, connect machine data, or plan commissioning and recovery.
- Work through an example. Calculator pages explain formulas, units and exclusions; CSV worksheets help you document inputs and decisions.
- Check the result. Compare it with primary documentation, equipment limits and approved site procedures before applying it. Shopfloor is an educational resource, not installation approval.
Reading, tools and downloads require no account, payment or email address. Most calculators work without JavaScript; the register decoder runs in your browser and needs JavaScript. Server calculator inputs appear in URLs, so use non-sensitive examples.
Six parts
- Originals — technical articles written for this site: explainers, comparisons, and field guides.
- Fresh — an feed of headlines from external automation publications, refreshed on a best-effort basis. Each headline links to its publisher. Filter by source, topic, age, or keyword.
- Index — a curated, machine-readable index of external resources worth bookmarking: standards, documentation, and canonical references.
- Topics — coverage areas collecting originals, index entries, tools, and terms.
- Glossary — plain-language definitions of the field's technical terms.
- Tools — browser-based engineering calculators: 4–20 mA scaling, Modbus CRC, Modbus register and byte-order decoding, OEE, subnets, and unit conversion. All but the register decoder work without JavaScript; the decoder computes in your browser and sends nothing anywhere.
Principles
- Text-first and information-dense. No accounts, comments, votes, or personalization.
- Fast and durable: static pages, readable without JavaScript, built to be crawled and cited.
- Machine-readable by design: RSS, JSON Feed, sitemap, glossary data, and structured metadata below.
Machine-readable endpoints
- RSS 2.0 feed and JSON Feed — latest originals and index entries.
- Originals feeds (JSON) — essays only, no index entries.
- Fresh headlines with a
?format=jsonmachine-readable view. - Sitemap, robots.txt, and llms.txt for crawlers and AI agents.
- Glossary data — every definition as JSON.
- Topic graph and search index — taxonomy relationships and the server-side search corpus.
- Search — server-rendered, no JavaScript.
Contact and corrections
Report an error or ask about a page through the maintainer’s contact page. Include the Shopfloor URL, a primary reference and, for a calculator issue, non-sensitive inputs and the result you expected. The editorial policy explains the source and correction process.
Maintenance
Shopfloor is designed, built, and maintained by developer Yunus Emre Vurgun — publishing automation handles content updates through version control, and every page carries citation metadata so the work can be referenced properly.
Disclosure: the maintainer works professionally in the industrial software ecosystem, so some vendors and organizations named on Shopfloor are commercial connections. Vendor mentions appear as labeled ecosystem examples, never as endorsements, and the canonical explainers are written to stand without them.
Books from the maintainer
- Understanding the Shop Floor — a practical companion ebook for understanding the systems and concepts behind the shop floor (76 pages). Available on Gumroad.
- How to Remain Valuable When Intelligence Becomes Cheap — a practical book on the scarce human, economic, and strategic advantages that stay valuable as AI takes on more cognitive work (224 pages). Available on Gumroad.
Both are also described on the books page.
Legal
- Privacy policy — what is (and is not) collected.
- Terms of use — the fine print, including the engineering-advice disclaimer.
- Cookie policy — short version: no cookies of its own; Google Analytics sets two optional ones.