PLC-Course

Sprint 0 — Orientation

Before the clock starts. Set up your tools, take the pre-assessment, and get your bearings.

⏱️ Time Budget

~1 hour

🎯 Goals

By the end of Sprint 0 you should:

Have forked this repo and opened your six sprint-progress Issues
Know roughly where you stand — the pre-assessment tells you what to focus on
Have a copy of Bolton’s Programmable Logic Controllers, 5th Edition on your desk
(Optional) Have a working Python environment if you want to run the workbooks or the legacy Streamlit/Gradio versions of the interactive tools locally

🛠️ Setup

1. Fork this repo

Click Fork in the top-right of the GitHub page. Clone your fork:

git clone https://github.com/<your-username>/PLC-Course.git
cd PLC-Course

2. Interactive tools — no install required

Every interactive tool ships as a single static HTML page that runs in any browser. You can use them straight from the live course site:

Number Base Converter — Sprint 2
Scan Cycle Visualizer — Sprint 1
Timer / Counter Playground — Sprint 5
Ladder Playground — Sprints 3–6
Car Factory Simulator — capstone-level

If you’d rather hack on the tools or run them offline, each folder also contains the original Streamlit / Gradio version (app.py) with its own requirements.txt. The workbooks under workbooks/ are Jupyter notebooks and need a Python environment.

# Optional — only if you want the Python versions locally
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate          # on Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate
pip install jupyter

3. Open your six sprint-progress Issues

Use the 🏃 Sprint Progress Tracker template — one Issue per sprint. This is your dashboard.

4. Install Anki (optional but recommended)

Install Anki. The course’s flashcards live as markdown in flashcards/obsidian/all-sprints.md. Until the prebuilt .apkg ships, the simplest paths are:

Open the markdown in Obsidian with the Spaced Repetition plugin, or
Paste the Q/A pairs into Anki’s basic-card creator.

See flashcards/anki/README.md for details.

📝 Pre-Assessment

Take the pre-assessment. 20 questions, ~15 minutes. Don’t look anything up. Score yourself honestly.

The score tells you which sprints to dig into deepest:

Score	What it means
0–6	Bolton from page 1, no skipping. You’re in for a great ride.
7–12	Skim Sprints 1–2, focus on 3–6.
13–17	You have the basics. Use this course to firm up IEC 61131-3 fluency and safety.
18–20	You probably know more than this course teaches. Try the capstone first; come back for whatever bites you.

📚 What to Read This Week (in Bolton)

Preface (pages ix–xii) — the book’s own roadmap
Chapter 1 introduction (pages 1–6) — sets the stage for Sprint 1

➡️ Next

Once setup is done and the pre-assessment is scored, head to Sprint 1: Architecture & I/O.

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