Mechanical, electrical, and mechatronics departments know the problem: 12 to 16 rigs, 100 or more students, timetabling that is a patchwork of shifts and rotations. The result is uneven contact hours across a cohort sitting the same exam and the same job market. A browser-based simulator removes the constraint entirely.
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The problem
An industrial training rig runs into five figures USD once you add a programming terminal, guarding, and power distribution. Procurement, approval, and delivery commonly takes 12 to 24 months at most institutions. The students who motivated the purchase may have graduated before a single rung is written on the new equipment.
Studio 5000, TIA Portal, and GX Works are priced for industrial customers. Per-seat industrial pricing applied to a 100-student module is not viable. Version management across a heterogeneous lab adds further overhead that falls on academic staff rather than IT.
Distance learners, students on work-integrated learning placements, and postgraduate researchers cannot access physical lab equipment on demand. A web-based platform removes this barrier without requiring VPN access or remote desktop infrastructure.
When research projects and undergraduate teaching compete for the same physical rigs, one loses. Separating teaching onto a browser-based platform frees physical rigs for research use without scheduling conflicts.
The solution
Every student in a 100-person module can log in simultaneously. There is no queue, no shift allocation, and no seat limit on concurrent sessions. Contact hours become a scheduling choice, not a resource constraint.
IEC 61131-3 for standards literacy, Allen-Bradley for mining and manufacturing exposure, Siemens for process industry contexts — all in one platform. Mechatronics graduates who can navigate multiple vendor environments are more employable; the curriculum can reflect that without additional licences.
Fault diagnosis by logical elimination — not visual inspection — is a skill that is almost impossible to teach reliably on shared physical hardware where physical state is visible. The fault-injection module hides the fault source and requires students to diagnose through logic analysis alone.
Six structured interview preparation tracks give final-year students practice under timed conditions before they enter the job market. Graduate outcome reporting gains a differentiator beyond pass rates.
The /team admin console gives demonstrators and academic staff a view of who has completed what, before due dates rather than after. Learning paths can be structured to gate advanced scenarios behind foundational completions.
Postgraduate students investigating fault-tolerant sequencing, redundant logic, or multi-axis coordination can use sandbox mode without occupying a physical rig. Sandbox sessions are unconstrained in length and complexity.
Curriculum coverage
Every concept below maps to a graded scenario or sandbox exercise students write and run in the browser — from first-year fundamentals through to postgraduate state-machine and structured-text work. Concurrent access is unlimited, so a 100-student module can be in the editor at the same time without a rig queue.
Early adopters
Case study coming Q3 2026. A South African engineering faculty using the platform for a 90-student third-year Control Systems module.
Case study coming Q3 2026. A mechatronics postgraduate programme using the platform to supplement physical hardware access for dissertation research students.
Pricing
| Cohort size | Annual cost (USD) | vs individual Pro ($249/seat) |
|---|---|---|
| 30 seats | $5,970 / yr | Save $1,500 vs individual |
| 60 seats | $11,940 / yr | Save $3,000 vs individual |
| 120 seats | $23,880 / yr | Save $6,000 vs individual |
Teams seats at $199/yr vs $249/yr individual Pro — approximately 20% discount. See full pricing →
What's included
Related institutional pages
Create a free team account and invite your module cohort. No procurement cycle. No installation. Every student on day one.
Tell us your cohort size and what you run. We’ll come back with the right institutional access — and be straight about what the platform does and doesn’t do.