Cells, devices and flows

A project describes an installation. A cell is that project connected to real hardware and running.

What a cell is

A cell names what is really there and how to reach it. Until a project has one, everything it does is simulated — which is the right way to build a program, and the reason the demo project is safe to open on any machine.

Devices

A device is one thing the cell talks to: a robot, or a person at a screen. A robot device carries its address and the programs it can run. Adding a device is how the cell learns that this project drives that robot.

Flows

A flow is logic that runs in the cell rather than on the robot: watch a value, react to it, tell a device to do something. Flows are built from nodes rather than written as code — log a message, set a value, wait for a value to reach a target, run a program on a device.

Use them for the coordination between things. The robot's own motion belongs in a program.

The operator HMI

The screens an operator uses are part of the cell, not of the robot. They are built from a small set of components — a button, a label, a selector — each bound to a variable, so pressing a button on a tablet sets the value a flow or a program is watching.

That is why the same screens open on a laptop, a tablet or the FANUC pendant: they are clients of the cell. What an operator does with them is Operating a cell.