Foundations
Track A takes you from knowing nothing about OPC UA to holding a working, tuned subscription against a real server. It covers what OPC UA is, how to connect and browse, how to read and write, and how subscriptions actually behave, which is where most projects go wrong.
| Courses | 4 |
|---|---|
| Lessons | 38 |
| Prerequisites | None. You need a laptop and a terminal. No PLC, no licence, no vendor software. |
| Who it is for | Anyone touching OPC UA for the first time: controls engineers, integrators, developers, and technical managers who need to judge a supplier's answers. |
What you will be able to do
- You can explain what OPC UA gives you that MQTT and Modbus do not, without hand-waving.
- You can connect to any OPC UA server, list its endpoints, and read the security it offers.
- You can browse an unfamiliar address space and find the data you need without a tag list.
- You can read and write values, and read the status code you get back instead of ignoring it.
- You can create a subscription that reports what you need at a rate your consumer can take.
- You can tell whether a silent data stream means nothing changed or the connection died.
Courses in this track
What OPC UA actually is
OPC UA is not a fieldbus and not a broker. This course places it precisely: what it moves that other protocols do not, where it sits between the PLC and the MES, and how the specification is numbered, which is the first thing that confuses everyone.
8 lessons · about 62 minutes
Connect and browse
Everything in OPC UA starts with an endpoint and ends in the address space. This course covers discovery, the secure channel and session lifecycle, the eight NodeClasses, references, and why a namespace index is not an address: the mistake that breaks projects months later.
10 lessons · about 78 minutes
Read, write, call
The three verbs that do most of the work, and the DataValue they all revolve around. This course covers attributes, Variant typing, reading the status code you got back rather than ignoring it, writing without provoking a type mismatch, and calling methods.
9 lessons · about 66 minutes
Subscriptions done right
Subscriptions are where OPC UA projects succeed or quietly fail. This course separates publishing interval from sampling interval, applies deadband and triggers at the source, sizes queues so you stop losing samples silently, and adds the heartbeat that tells you the connection is alive.
11 lessons · about 84 minutes
Last verified 7 September 2026 against OPC UA 1.05.07. OPC UA Connect is an educational resource and is not affiliated with the OPC Foundation.