Platform

What the platform delivers

ForgeIEC is a complete platform for industrial automation — from programming to control system. Every component carries the name of a blacksmith’s tool and has a clearly defined remit. Components are standalone daemons or applications, jointly running over zero-copy IPC and gRPC.

	Component	Remit	Status
	ForgeIEC Studio	IEC 61131-3 IDE + bus config + AI assistant	productive
	anvild	PLC runtime + Anvil zero-copy IPC between subsystems	productive
	bellowsd	OPC-UA / HMI gateway	in progress
🔧	tongs-*	Fieldbus bridges (Modbus / EtherCAT / Profibus / EthernetIP)	mixed
🖥️	Screen	Industrial kiosk browser (HMI panel)	productive
🏠	Hearth	IIoT subscriber / SCADA layer	planned
📒	Ledger	Order management / MES integration	planned

The components

🛠️ ForgeIEC Studio — the workbench

Betrifft: ForgeIEC Studio

Native C++/Qt6 IDE on the workstation. All five IEC languages (ST + IL + FBD + LD + SFC), bus configuration, live monitor, oscilloscope, AI assistant built in. Tree-sitter syntax, gRPC link to anvild, MCP server for LLM tooling.

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🔥 anvild — the runtime + Anvil IPC

Betrifft: anvild

Rust/Tokio daemon on the target PLC. Multi-task scheduler with pthread parallelism, deterministic scan cycles, gRPC listener for Studio, subprocess manager for the bus bridges. Stale-SHM auto- cleanup at startup.

Built in is Anvil — the zero-copy shared-memory layer between runtime, bridges and external subscribers. Based on iceoryx2 with ABI probe against type-hash drift. Wire protocol for status, I/O, diagnostics.

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🌬️ bellowsd — the bellows

Betrifft: bellowsd

OPC-UA server + Modbus TCP server for HMI integration. Exports pool variables with the bellows_export flag as OPC-UA nodes + Modbus coils. Gated individually per variable.

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🔧 tongs-* — the fieldbus tongs

Betrifft: 🔧tongs-* anvild

One daemon per protocol. Uniform fault model (OK/WARN/FAULT/OFFLINE/UNKNOWN), FDD-driven diagnostic bits, Anvil zero-copy IPC to the runtime. Modbus TCP productive, EtherCAT in progress, Profibus + EtherNet/IP planned.

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🖥️ Screen — the kiosk browser

CEF-based industrial kiosk browser (Chromium Embedded Framework

• Rust + winit). Runs fullscreen on HMI panels, opens any web HMI (Bellows / Hearth / 3rd-party). Integrated Rocket web server for settings (network, WireGuard, time zone, 80+ languages), D-Bus backend for NetworkManager / timedated / localed.

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🏠 Hearth — the forge hearth

IIoT subscriber + SCADA layer. Plans: subscribe to Anvil topics, time-series-DB integration (InfluxDB, TimescaleDB), Mosquitto MQTT bridge, alarm management, Grafana dashboards. Planned — architecture spec in preparation.

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📒 Ledger — the order book

Order management + MES integration. Plans: production orders, piece-count tracking, traceability (material → batch → product), shift log, bridge to ERP systems. Planned — comes after Hearth.

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How the components fit together

flowchart LR
    Studio[ForgeIEC Studio
IDE + AI]
    Anvild[anvild
Runtime]
    Bridges["tongs-*
Fieldbus bridges"]
    Bellows[bellowsd
HMI Gateway]
    Screen[Screen
Kiosk browser]
    Hearth[Hearth
IIoT / SCADA]
    Ledger[Ledger
MES]

    Studio -.->|gRPC| Anvild
    Anvild -->|Anvil IPC| Bridges
    Anvild -->|Anvil IPC| Bellows
    Anvild -->|Anvil IPC| Hearth
    Bellows -->|OPC-UA / Modbus| Hearth
    Hearth -->|HTTP| Screen
    Hearth -.->|REST| Ledger

Studio lives on the workstation, everything else on the target systems. Workstations + target systems can be linked together via the team federation model — multiple workstations see their machines.

Open source + standing on predecessors

All components are AGPL-3.0. Source visible on GitHub + Forgejo. Build reproducible via Debian CPack + signed APT repository.

ForgeIEC stands on the shoulders of OpenPLC (Thiago Alves, since 2018) and keeps file compatibility with OpenPLC projects. Read the founding story for the full path from OpenPLC fork to standalone platform.