The following is a supplement to Geek Challenge Results: New Year's Beeramid by the Numbers. The partial summation of xy This function can be solved to a polynomial of order y+1 by the method outlined here. Below is a graphical representation of xy.  In this graph, y=2, but this is representative of any integer value of y>0.  The total area under the curve is ∫ xy .... [Read the rest of this blog...]

January's Geek Challenge questioned the construction of a New Year's Eve party beer can pyramid. I first encountered this challenge in my freshman year at Marquette. I was building the beeramid with five other students at a band party, some were engineers and math majors and we couldn't figure it out. I didn't sleep until I found the answer at 4am! The correct answer for an 8 layer Beerami... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Rick Rietz, Director of Consulting Services What do you like best about working at DMC? The people I work with are definitely the smartest group I have ever worked with. Everyone at DMC picks things up quickly and working with them is a real pleasure. I also appreciate the variety of work and challenges that I encounter every day working with our clients. It makes every day interesting. I k... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Those who visit DMC may notice our ever-changing "Quote Board." This is where we document the most infamous utterances of the moment.

I started at DMC two months ago and it has been a very busy two months. Since joining DMC I’ve been focused on one large project, but the project is divided up into many distinct sections and I have been involved in nearly every one the sections. I have been creating user interfaces, the control logic, hardware addressing, and what seems like a million other things. I enjoy being busy and DMC has ... [Read the rest of this blog...]

A lot of our SharePoint clients at DMC want a SharePoint site which allows users outside their company network to have login access to the site. SharePoint supports a type of user authentication called claims-based authentication, which is a composite of Windows Active Directory authentication and forms-based authentication. Forms-based authentication stores the credentials for users not within an... [Read the rest of this blog...]

In some cases, regardless of how well a SharePoint site is built out, users express frustration when discussing the user experience.  Examples are asking for your credentials every time you open a file, experiencing long wait times, or having trouble accessing pages.  As it turns out, the difficulties that they are experiencing can usually be solved with a few simple configuration settin... [Read the rest of this blog...]

 I was recently working on a multi-axis Yaskawa-based motion control project and ran into an issue using an in-software position latch. In this case, we were running a servo at fairly high speed and trying to record the encoder position when a sensor was triggered. But it turned out that the PLC scan rate, servo speed, and gearing ratios involved were resulting in unacceptable accuracy issues... [Read the rest of this blog...]

One of the keys to a happy customer is a happy employee, and one of the keys to a happy employee is an awesome work environment. As part of DMC’s administrative team, one of my many duties is to help ensure these conditions.  In many ways, DMC administrative work is like customer service for our own employees. Aside from making sure everything is running smoothly from paychecks to printer ink... [Read the rest of this blog...]

DMC is expanding again! After relocating to our office at 2222 N. Elston Avenue last year we quickly outgrew the space and needed to take over more of the building. Rather than a traditional ground breaking ceremony, we decided to have a wall destroying party.  So, a couple of weeks ago, after the previous occupants moved out, we took out some of our aggressions on a hapless partition wall w... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Deborah Nunaley, Office Manager What was it like to grow up on a farm and what skills have stuck with you? It’s hard work, but I would never trade that upbringing.  On a family farm everyone is involved in the work and there are many factors, like weather, that are out of your control.  On our farm in central Indiana, we raised beef cattle and grew corn, soybeans and wheat.  One... [Read the rest of this blog...]

With the imminent arrival of DMC’s second FedEx Day the brainstorming began. Amid ideas to improve our internal network and everyday tasks, the idea to one day take over the world started gaining support. Everyone knows that the first step towards world domination is the creation of your very own robot army. With that in mind, DMC decided it was time to build its own office aut... [Read the rest of this blog...]

During a New Year's Eve party, a simple pyramid was constructed by standing 3 beer cans on a table in a triangle, and then placing a single can on the top center of the three. The pyramid was expanded by expanding the triangular base to 3 cans on each side, adding 2 more cans to the second layer and adding a single can on top as the third layer. How many cans are in the pyramid when it is ex... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Those who visit DMC may notice our ever-changing "Quote Board." This is where we document the most infamous utterances of the moment.

Imagine being able to create real-life, three-dimensional objects just as easily as we print documents from Microsoft Word. Need a new case for your phone? Don’t buy one, just print it. Do you want a keychain customized with your company’s logo? Just print it. Pretty cool, huh? It was this cool factor that drew Boris, Ryan, and me to the idea of making a 3D printer. During... [Read the rest of this blog...]

I used to have an old Motorola cell phone, actually it wasn't even a phone, back then it was called a DPC - "Digital Personal Communicator", which in my mind sounds much more scientific than a modern "cell phone". This is used to be an awesome piece of equipment back in its day (actually it was the smallest  phone in 1989). However, it's quite useless now since it does not support m... [Read the rest of this blog...]

You may or may not be surprised to learn  that beer and bacon rank highly on the favorite things list of many a DMC employee. So when we heard that Paddy Long's, a Lakeview neighborhood pub, hosts a regular Beer and Bacon Tasting, we booked a DMC social outing. Nearly twenty DMC employees and friends enjoyed the tasting of five cuts of bacon paired with five beers. The entire ... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Since joining the DMC team, I’ve had the opportunity to contribute to a wide variety of awesome projects and learn several new technologies. During a recent embedded design project, I was tasked with converting our circuit schematic to a printed circuit board (PCB) layout using a software package called Altium Designer. Altium is a very powerful tool for schematic capture and layout (as well as FP... [Read the rest of this blog...]

"A chicken in every pot and a display on every wall." -Herbert Hoover President Hoover was a prescient and oft-misquoted man. Fortunately for us, DMC has realized his vision of liquid crystal abundance. DMC's new office is full of displays. Displays on desks, displays on walls, and displays in pockets. With this embarrassment of riches comes great responsibility. A responsibility t... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Those who visit DMC may notice our ever-changing "Quote Board." This is where we document the most infamous utterances of the moment.