Last month's challenge was define the shape of a roller coaster loop that would create a constant G-force experience.  We asked what shape to start with, and how to modify it to make the loop.  To create a constant G-force loop, you can start with the basic shape of a circle.  Traveling around a circle creates a centripetal force that the rider experiences as a G-... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Event Overview Over forty business and IT leaders gathered to attend a SharePoint Dashboard Workshop at the Tooling & Manufacturing Association on August 19, 2010 led by DMC. Everyone in attendance received a copy of the Michael Lewis best-seller Moneyball (Lewis is also the author of The Blind Side, The Big Short, and Liar's Poker).   Moneyball tells the story of ho... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Eric Nielsen, Systems Engineer What do you like best about working at DMC? I really appreciate the community of intelligent and driven individuals and wide range of projects we work on.  I couldn’t last in a monotonous position where I had to do the same thing every day; however the ever changing projects at DMC, the range of customers and industries we partner with, and the ability to ut... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Recently DMC put together another BMS Validation Test Stand for testing the BMS inside a PHEV battery pack.  Before we shipped it, we wanted to demonstrate the basic capabilities of the battery cell simulators, software, and other electronics. 

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Like we do about three times a year, we had an all-company all day off-site meeting last Friday.  The agenda for the day was pretty fantastic - we all loaded up on my boat at Belmont Harbor (maybe a little crowded), headed south to the Chicago Harbor Lock, & then down the river to Ping Tom Park. Once at Ping Tom Park, we broke up into several small groups and handed video cameras to... [Read the rest of this blog...]

So I've been using National Instruments hardware now for 15 years and programming in LabVIEW for 10.  First, that makes me feel pretty old.  Second, why is it that this is the first year I have gone to NI week?  I don't know.  But I finally understand why everyone else makes such a big deal about attending. It is a great time.  You get to network with a bunch of grea... [Read the rest of this blog...]

DMC is hitting the ground running at NIWeek 2010.  "It's Time".  This is the theme of the keynote of the first official day of NIWeek.  Time to develop, real-time control, timing for data synchronization, time to market,  everything that involves time, and how NI products can help. This is the first official day of the conference, but the second for DMC, as again this... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Remember When, 1996: "Macarena" was at the top of the charts NBC had 8 of the top 10 shows, including ER, Seinfeld & Friends, (and you could record those shows using a state of the art Hi-Fi 4-head VCR), Gas was going for about $1.25/gallon With a 100Mhz WinBook XP5, with 16MB RAM & an 810 MB HDD, a little bit of knowledge, and a lot to learn, I started DMC on July 29... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Danny Budzinski, Project Engineer What do you like best about working at DMC?  It's great to solve problems for a living.  At DMC our customers come to us with such interesting and intricate challenges, and being involved in that is what gets me excited as an engineer. Can you describe one of the most interesting projects you've worked on at DMC? About a year ago, I did some work... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Of course the answer to this question can vary significantly, but far too often, ideas that are supposed to change things by 1% are dismissed prematurely.  Why does this happen? To most people, the number 1 is a pretty small number.  If you have to make an effort to change something and you expect the result of that effort to yield a 1% improvement, a common gut reaction is that it’s pr... [Read the rest of this blog...]

We talk a lot at DMC about making sure to back up your programs and to work in teams where everyone is knowledgeable enough to take over any or every part of a project. We always joke that this is in case an engineer gets, you know, “hit by a bus”. The logic is that we never want to be in a position where a project hinges on 1 person. That way, regardless of availability a DMC... [Read the rest of this blog...]

DMC will be leading the Tooling and Manufacturing Association's executive breakfast workshop on August 19, 2010.  The event will focus on defining Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and using Microsoft SharePoint to achieve business goals. “There are true cost-saving and innovation benefits companies will realize by taking full advantage of the SharePoint platform.  Unfort... [Read the rest of this blog...]

32-bit applications have been around for a long time while 64-bit operating systems are only recently gaining popularity. Therefore, I would expect that the 64-bit OS successors would make it easy to run legacy 32-bit apps. And, they do as long as you compile them correctly.[Read this blog...]

Ok, we really knew about this from the the Shamrock Shuffle earlier this year, but Johnathan Sullivan is now, without any ambiguity, proclaimed: "World's Fastest Engineer who works at DMC" I enjoyed being in that esteemed position for a short period (although my standing had one more modifier - see here). Team DMC had a fantastic showing in the Chicago Bastille Day 5K, held in Lincoln Park on ... [Read the rest of this blog...]

You are curious about SharePoint and KPI dashboards.  You are still trying to determine the difference between SharePoint Foundation, SharePoint 2010, WSS and MOSS.  You are not quite sure what KPI stands for.  You also don’t have 7-10 extra minutes in your workday to watch a video blog and find out. DMC understands!  Today’s society is increasingly on-the-go, that’s why DMC... [Read the rest of this blog...]

While it is usually preferable to avoid mixing development environments for a project, sometimes we need to create a mixed platform solution.  In a recent project, I needed to create a class library in C# to interact with a LabVIEW 2009 SP1 application. I fired up Visual Studio 2010 and created a quick .Net 4 application.  On attempting to create a constructor in LabVIEW, I got the erro... [Read the rest of this blog...]

 Cesar Pena: Senior Project Engineer You have had the opportunity to live and work in several different countries; what have those experiences been like? It broadens your view of the world and opens your way of thinking.  You definitely learn to appreciate things that are usually taken for granted.  For example, in America you can generally find a store open at anytime of t... [Read the rest of this blog...]

 In an ideal world, a design project has well defined phases with appropriate time alloted for each milestone.  In the real world, clients often bring a project that is already behind schedule, needing results yesterday.  Board design can be a cumbersome process, often taking weeks before something physical is ready for the end customer.  Breadboarding is an option, but it ofte... [Read the rest of this blog...]

DMC Newsletter Geek Challenge  - May 2010: Devise and perform an experiment to determine the volumetric density of liquid water in the near-ground atmosphere during a hard rain.  Simply put, if you could freeze time and collect all of the liquid water in a 1 cubic meter box of atmosphere at eye level during a rain storm, how much liquid water would you have?   We know that ther... [Read the rest of this blog...]

In the first part of my series, LabVIEW Data Storage: Overview of TDMS, I introduced TDMS as our preferred file format and pointed users toward exploring and using TDMS themselves. In this post, I'm assuming that you are comfortable handling channels, properties, and data and want to learn more about optimizing your TDMS files to both decrease disk space and improve performance when opening and mo... [Read the rest of this blog...]