Entries for the 'Software' Category

What is it? Many developers may be familiar with the concept of a logging platform. Essentially, a logging platform is a modular system that is designed to be plugged into a project and allow the system to keep a time-stamped record of events with minimal effect on execution time or system resources. Think of it as a journal of a program’s execution. One of the most commonly used logging pla... [Read the rest of this blog...]

 As many of you may know, we used last week’s Oktoberfest party as an unofficial house warming party for our new office space. In addition to having a great turnout despite uncooperative weather, the Kinect Demo team from FedEx Day 2010 put in some extra hours to get our new display case setup to welcome guests. If you haven’t seen the display case, an early video is available here,... [Read the rest of this blog...]

WCF web services can be integrated into LabVIEW but is not as easy as you might hope.

[Read this blog...]

When, besides in children’s cartoons (and my Christmas blogs), do you ever get to see robots dancing? At the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry! This past week I had another opportunity to check out cutting edge robotics at the museum. This event was showcasing Aldebaran Robotics’ Nao (pronounced “Now”) Robot, a top notch humanoid robot companion. Not only is this robot the star of th... [Read the rest of this blog...]

DMC is excited to announce the achievement of Gold status within the Software Development competency of Microsoft’s new partner program. The criteria for earning Gold status in the new Microsoft Partner Network is far more stringent and promises to better represent organizations who have demonstrated the highest, most consistent capability and commitment within specific technical and business s... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Source Code Control (SCC) is universally acknowledged by developers as an important part of developing and maintaining projects.  Effective use of takes discipline because what is not checked into the repository is not saved.  Opening a project several years after the fact to find out that the latest code resided on a long decommissioned computer is not a pleasant experience.  ... [Read the rest of this blog...]

I recently had the experience of working on a Visual Basic.NET 1.1 application that our company created a number of years ago.  This brought the whole issue of maintaining legacy code into sharp focus.  Legacy industrial software could easily take up several blog entries on its own so we will focus specifically on Visual Basic 6 and .NET (Visual Basic.NET or C#). For a blog entry on wor... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Testing your BMS is a necessity. Determining a strategy to complete that testing is not so easy.  It is tempting to over focus on hardware cost minimization, which must be weighed against the cost of ineffective or incomplete testing.  Here we explore three different strategies for balancing hardware cost with performance.

[Read this blog...]

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) To help explain why one would choose Silverlight for application development, I think it’s important to have a basic understanding of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).  Silverlight is one of a small handful of RIA software frameworks that are used to build interactive web applications for internal enterprise applications and public-facing Internet si... [Read the rest of this blog...]

This article presents the basics of Web Part development (with and without Silverlight) along with solutions for 2 common "gotcha's" for new developers.

[Read 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. 

[Read this blog...]

This is part one of my blog series detailing the use and optimization of the TDMS format. Here is a table of contents for all blogs in this series: LabVIEW Data Storage: Overview of TDMS LabVIEW Data Storage: TDMS Performance Tweaking LabVIEW Data Storage: TDMS Usage Case Study   Here at DMC, almost all of our LabVIEW applications acquire data at one point or another. This data... [Read the rest of this blog...]

I'm not sure if anyone else remembers taking typing tests.  I know I do, and not fondly either.  While no fun to take, they serve a valuable purpose to a would-be employer.  If you are going to pay someone to complete tasks that involve entering text on a keyboard, shouldn't you make sure you are hiring someone who can crank out as many words per minute as possible, while ... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Siemens and Rockwell Automation are two giants competing in industrial automation technology today.  Rockwell (aka Allen-Bradley) seems to be more popular in the US market, but Siemens has a larger international customer base.  A cursory Google search will reveal that there is no lack of debate among automation professionals over which one is preferred.

As someone who uses both platforms regularly, I would like to compare one of the key differences between them - function blocks.

[Read this blog...]

I had a customer that wanted a Business Intelligence SharePoint web-part to track their facebook fans over time, to measure the effectiveness of their Facebook marketing push. Little did I suspect that I would be a casualty in the wars over database scalability. I was excited because I'd heard great things about the active Facebook developer community, and found that the Facebook Query ... [Read the rest of this blog...]

DMC has recently developed a set of versatile, powerful, time-saving, and customizable web parts to utilize in our SharePoint dashboard solutions.  These tools provide a huge array of ways to visualize data and KPI's critical to a company's operation in a way that is simple and easy to interpret.   Here are some of the major benefits of this new web part architecture:   ... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Since their conception PLC programs have been founded on simple programs. However in the past few years automation requirements have grown more complex and demanding, resulting in PLC manufacturers beginning to include some higher level programming concepts in their software packages.   

[Read this blog...]

This is the final entry in a 3 part series for creating modular, scalable LabVIEW programs. Feel free to visit the first two entries, “Creating a Modular LabVIEW Application (Part 1 of 3): Creating an Expandable Data Format” and “Creating a Modular LabVIEW Application (Part 2 of 3): Eliminating VI Dependencies”. This final part will focus on the need for a universal control and communication... [Read the rest of this blog...]

This is the second part of a 3 part series on creating modular, scalable LabVIEW applications. If you haven’t, feel free to read the first section, “Creating a Modular LabVIEW Application (Part 1 of 3): Creating an Expandable Data Format”. This part of the series will focus on avoiding data dependency between different devices and VI’s. Obviously there are going to be some cases where i... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Many of the LabVIEW applications that DMC develops are based on our internally developed state machine architecture. This architecture has a proven record of allowing us to create flexible, robust, and easy to maintain applications. One of our clients has a large, multi-PC system built upon this platform which has been in use for a period of years. The architecture allowed several addit... [Read the rest of this blog...]