There is a graveyard of industrial software pilots, and most of the headstones say the same thing: the plant wouldn't let us touch the PLC. They were right not to. A working control system is the most expensive thing to break in a facility, and "trust our new box" is not an argument that survives contact with the person who gets paged when it fails.
So we built KNOCE to start where the plant already is.
Mode 2 first
Deployed as a smart gateway, the KNO1-PLC sits beside the controls you already run — Allen-Bradley, Siemens, CODESYS, the Parker or Danfoss controllers on the units, the engine and genset controllers beside them — and reads them over OPC-UA, Modbus, or CAN. Read-only. Your control logic, your safety systems, and your vendor warranties stay exactly as they are; the gateway issues no control writes, and it is deployed on a segmented, least-privilege zone with outbound-only connectivity. What it adds is everything above the loop: a fleet view, alarms with discipline, findings with evidence, and work orders that write themselves. Telemetry leaves the site as MQTT with named tags — the names the installer gave the sensors — so a new site arrives named and typed the moment it connects.
What the plant manager hears
"Nothing changes on your control side, and in a week you'll see the whole site on one screen." That sentence closes more deployments than any feature list, because it removes the only objection that matters. The engineering team doesn't have to defend a new controller; they have to plug in a cable.
Mode 1 when a panel comes due
Panels age out. When one does, the same KNO1-PLC becomes the controller: deterministic IEC 61131-3 logic on real-time cores, 76 I/O channels including 20 high-power outputs, in a sealed IP69 unit designed for machine mounting — in qualifying installations, no separate PLC, I/O rack, or cabinet. Same platform, same data, same screens. One fewer thing in the electrical room. Consolidation happens on the plant's replacement schedule, asset by asset, not on a vendor's launch schedule.
Three phases, no cliff
- Phase 1 — Don't touch control. Read what's there.
- Phase 2 — Add the operations layer across everything the gateway can see.
- Phase 3 — Consolidate onto KNO1 when it's the right time for each panel.
The industrial AI that ships is the kind that respects the order of those phases. Everything else is a demo with a headstone.