StateTick
Four drawings on the table. Then automation starts talking.
Mechanical puts down a general arrangement. Electrical a schematic. Process a flow diagram. Production a sequence of operations. Four disciplines, four pictures, and a conversation everybody can join.
Automation has no picture to put down, so it describes instead — and describing is where a project quietly loses the room. The FSM Planner exists to give automation something to put on the table.
A drawing the whole team can read
Every other discipline hands over a picture. Automation has never had one to hand over.
Sit in a design review and watch what happens. The mechanical engineer puts a drawing on the table and everyone leans in. The electrical engineer does the same. Process, the same. People point at things, disagree about things, and leave with a shared picture in their heads.
Then it is automation's turn, and the conversation changes shape. Whatever is on the screen is readable by exactly one person in the room. The rest of the team is not being difficult — they simply have no way in. So the discussion becomes a description, the description gets nodded at, and everyone finds out at commissioning whether the nod meant anything.
A state machine is not a compromise for this. It is genuinely the right picture: here is where the machine can be, here is what has to be true to move on, here is where it goes. A production supervisor can read that. So can a mechanical engineer, a process engineer, and the customer.
Sequence problems get found in the review rather than on the machine. When production says “that is not how we run it,” they say it while it is still a drawing.
Sketch first, structure later
Draw the whole line on day one. Decide what the variables are when you know.
You can lay out an entire line before anyone has picked a valve, using placeholders — machines, states and transitions with names and positions and nothing behind them yet. Parallelism included: two things that happen at once are simply two machines drawn next to each other. It is enough to walk a customer through the sequence and get it agreed.
Then as each piece settles, you fill the placeholder in where it stands. Nothing is redrawn, and the layout everyone signed off in week one is the layout that ships.
And the structure is waiting for you
“Later” does not mean a flat list of a thousand tags. When you reach the variables, the shape is already there: interfaces describe a kind of connection, equipment gathers the ones a device has, and instances are the devices themselves. You are filling in a structure rather than inventing a naming convention.
For the drawing, one consequence matters more than the rest. A state is written against an interface, not a particular device — so a state that says “run the drive” works on any pump you point it at.
The same clamp, the same start-up, the same clean-down drops into every station that has the right interface — and afterwards it is edited in one place, not six.
How that structure is organised, and how it stays separate from the wiring, is the subject of The Plant, Described.
Stopping and pausing come with it
Every machine you create starts with a fault path and a pause path waiting for you.
Machines stop — someone hits e-stop, a guard opens, a sensor disagrees with reality. And machines pause: an operator wants thirty seconds to clear a jam, then wants it to carry on from where it was rather than from the beginning.
You do not draw either of those. You nominate them. Which condition means stop, where to sit while stopped, which condition means pause, where to go while paused. Four answers, and the order is handled for you:
There is a third case worth knowing, because it is the one that surfaces on site: a fault landing while the machine is already paused. The pause is kept rather than dropped. Clear the fault and the machine goes back to being paused — not to idle, and not to the top of the sequence.
Side by side, never nested
A deliberate choice, made for one reason: the time you would otherwise lose finding things.
State machines can be nested. A machine whose state contains another machine, whose state contains another. It is elegant on a whiteboard, and it means that when something is wrong at three in the morning, the answer is three drawings deep and you have to hold all three in your head at once.
We left it out on purpose. In StateTick every machine is a peer, laid out next to the others, and what you see is the whole of it. Nothing is folded away.
Machines still depend on each other, of course. The difference is that the dependency is drawn — a link on the plan you can point at in a meeting, rather than a relationship you have to open something to find. Nothing about how one machine waits for another is folded away inside anything else.
And you can watch it run
This is the reason the flat layout earns its keep. Connect to a running machine and the plan lights up — the active state in each machine glows, live, while the plant works. You are not reading a status list and imagining the drawing; you are watching the drawing you designed from.
Stand an operator in front of it and they can tell you what the machine is doing. Stand a mechanical engineer in front of it and they can tell you it is waiting on their cylinder.
Two things at once means two machines
The last consequence of the same decision, and the one that pays for itself twice.
Parallelism is machines, not branches.
A machine is in one state at a time. When two things happen at once, you draw them as what they are — two machines, sitting next to each other on the plan, each showing its own state.
That keeps the first promise: you can always see the whole of a machine, because there is no arm folded away somewhere else in the picture. And it delivers something a branch never can — two machines genuinely run apart, each on its own clock, so a fast interlock sits beside a slow recipe at rates an order of magnitude different and neither waits on the other.
Draw the machine, and the parallelism is already true rather than merely drawn.
The Plant, Described — the shape underneath the drawing: why each machine keeps its own clock, how the equipment model is organised, and how machines coordinate.
Three in the Morning — what happens when the phone rings: live signal monitoring, the FSM log, and finding the answer without a guess.
Build one yourself — the hands-on tutorial: sketch a two-motor line with placeholders, then let Construct Composite create every state and condition you named.