Web-based HMI development for machines

If you're searching for a powerful web-based HMI platform that's PLC vendor agnostic, easy to use, and plays nice with modern dev tooling, Smart HMI's WebIQ is well worth a look.

A familiar, web-native design experience

The WebIQ Designer gives you a drag-and-drop interface for laying out screens, built around the same container-layout concepts you'd find in modern web development. That means you can build responsive HMIs that adapt gracefully to different screen sizes — from a panel mounted on the machine to a tablet on the plant floor.

Plays nice with Git

Here's the part that excites me most: WebIQ projects are stored as plain-text files — HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Because the project lives as text, it drops straight into version control with Git. You get diffs, branches, pull requests, and history for your HMI, just like the rest of your codebase.

Connect to live PLC data over OPC UA

WebIQ ships with an integrated OPC UA client for connecting to live PLC data. Smart HMI even hosts a public OPC UA server with sample data, so you can test your connectivity and bindings before you ever touch the real machine.

The takeaway

Tools like this let us build sophisticated machine interfaces while adopting the contemporary software-development methodologies we use everywhere else — responsive design, version control, and testable, maintainable code. That's exactly the kind of modernization we love to bring to the factory floor.