Build your first project

This tutorial takes you from a freshly installed Nexus to a working operator screen, running live in a browser. It needs no PLC or other device: every value comes from tags that live inside Nexus, and you drive them yourself from the screen you build.

By the end you will have:

• a tank whose level you set from a slider,
• a pump you start and stop from a toggle,
• an alarm that fires when the tank goes above 70%,
• a trend of the level over the last few minutes,
• an alarm table listing what is active,

all running in Spectrum, and updating the moment you save a change in Studio.

It takes about thirty minutes.

Before you start

You need three things, all covered earlier in this manual:

You need	Covered in
Nexus installed and running	Install on Windows or Install on Linux
An administrator account, created in the first-run wizard	First run
Studio installed on your workstation	Installing the client software

Any account with designer rights will do; the administrator you created at first run has them.

Licensing

A new Nexus starts unlicensed. Before you begin, open the Nexus web page, sign in as the administrator, and click Start Trial in the banner at the top. The trial unlocks everything for two hours, which is plenty for this tutorial, and includes the historian module that history and the trend need. Without it, the Tag Editor cannot record history and Studio reports LICENSE_NOT_ENTITLED.

The parts

1. Create a project — connect Studio to Nexus and create an empty project.
2. Create tags — make the tank level and pump tags, record the level's history, and add a high-level alarm.
3. Build the screen — lay out the tank, slider, toggle, trend and alarm table, and bind each one to a tag.
4. Run it in Spectrum — save, open the project in a browser, and watch the alarm and the trend respond.

Each part links to the next at the foot of the page.