Flexi Soft Designer -

And when that machine runs its first full shift without a single false trip—when the safety gate opens and closes like a sigh, and the light curtain parts for a pallet like a curtain on a stage—you realize the tool did exactly what it was designed to do.

But the real magic is the simulator. Before a single real wire is stripped or a single real relay clicks, you can hit “Simulate.” A virtual control panel appears. You toggle virtual light curtains, press virtual E-stops, and watch your logic execute in near real-time. The outputs change color. Timers count down. Muting sequences play out. And if something fails—a muting lamp stuck on, a reset attempted too early—the software shows you exactly why. No review of Flexi Soft Designer would be honest without acknowledging its weight. This is not a tool for casual tinkerers. The learning curve is a wall. The terminology (OSSD, EDMI, restart interlock) assumes you already speak safety standards fluently. And the licensing—while dongle-free in recent versions—still carries the faint industrial aroma of “request a quote.”

But that tension is precisely the point. Safety software should not be easy to misuse. Flexi Soft Designer makes safety correct by default and dangerous only by deliberate, difficult override. Flexi Soft Designer is not beautiful in the way a modern web app is beautiful. It has no gradients, no animations, no dark mode. Its beauty is older: the beauty of a well-drawn schematic, a properly calculated risk, a machine that stops exactly when it should and not a millisecond later. flexi soft designer

The genius of the tool is not complexity, but contained complexity. You don’t write ladder logic. You don’t type a single line of ST. Instead, you wire blocks together with virtual connections, defining parameters in clean dialog boxes. Muting timers? Set in milliseconds. Contactor feedback? One checkbox. Reset type? Manual, monitored, or automatic—your call. What makes Flexi Soft Designer fascinating is what it demands from you. Traditional PLC programming rewards cleverness—tight loops, reusable functions, elegant state machines. Flexi Soft Designer punishes cleverness. It rewards clarity .

For the controls engineer standing inside a dusty panel, laptop balanced on a toolbox, debugging a muting error at 2 AM, Flexi Soft Designer is not software. It is a lifeline. And when that machine runs its first full

Every safety function must be explicit. Every path from sensor to output must be traceable. The software doesn’t just let you build; it watches you. Mismatched data types? It will tell you. A feedback loop that bypasses a safety condition? It will refuse to compile. In this way, the tool becomes a silent second pair of eyes—a co-pilot who has memorized EN ISO 13849-1 and won’t let you cheat. Under the hood, Flexi Soft is a modular system: a head unit (CPU) plus expansion modules for inputs, outputs, relays, and communication (EtherNet/IP, PROFINET, PROFIBUS, etc.). Flexi Soft Designer manages this hardware puzzle effortlessly. You define your module arrangement in a rack view, and the software automatically assigns addresses, checks power budgets, and validates cross-module wiring.

Moreover, the software forces a degree of discipline that can feel suffocating if you’re used to general-purpose PLCs. Want to temporarily bypass a guard for maintenance? That requires a specific bypass function block with time limits and status outputs. Want to mute a light curtain for a pallet to pass? That’s a four-sensor muting array with sequenced timing, not a toggle switch. You toggle virtual light curtains, press virtual E-stops,

from SICK is that tool.