Entries for 'Danny Budzinski'

 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...]

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...]

Anyone who has frequented my blog entries knows that I am one of the biggest robot-enthusiasts at DMC. That's why I was so excited to get a chance to attend a lecture at the Museum of Science and Industry given recently by Dr. Minoru Asada, a top researcher in modern robotics and one of the driving forces behind Robocup, and Mr. Ken Nagasaka, of Panasonic Factory Solutions of America. Aside from ... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Ever wish you could replicate the NI Measurement and Automation Explorer interfaces in LabVIEW code? You can! Download DMC DAQmx Assistant Tools For years I have been looking for a good implementation of NI MAX that I could encapsulate and throw into my LabVIEW apps so that customers can edit measurement channels, scaling, calibration, etc. from inside of my application instead of havi... [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...]

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...]

  The concept of LabVIEW Object Oriented Programming (LVOOP) has been around for a number of years now, but has consistently been one of those areas that seemed to have to high of a learning curve to justify learning “just because”. Luckily, in a recent project I managed to get the green light for implementing an object oriented (OO) solution. For me the biggest appeal for OO programmi... [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...]

One of LabVIEW’s strongest points is that it is a very “approachable” programming languages.  Since it is a graphical language, it is relatively easy for a “non-programmer” to get a quick, simple, stand-alone program up and running. A lot of times, especially if you are just trying to get a quick data sample from something, this is all an engineer or technician might need. However, ther... [Read the rest of this blog...]

I was recently called up by a past customer who was using XP Windows embedded on an HP Neoware Thin Client who had lost their hard drive image and needed the machine restored. These types of machines are becoming more and more common, used as terminals for ATM’s, self checkout terminals, etc. They are moderately low cost, light, flexible platforms that don’t have any moving components li... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Well, it's here.  The moment you've all waited for.  Thanks to the holiday season, I have finally been able to follow up on my Roomba work!  I decided it would be a nice gesture to have Roomba do a little Christmas performance for everyone...

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  Recently, we created a help forum at DMC to share information between all of our engineers. Our goal was to create a standard place for people to ask questions and leverage our company’s collective experience and knowledge. It was also desirable that this information be stored in a reviewable manner so that questions only have to be answered once. Microsoft SharePoint provided a... [Read the rest of this blog...]

I was working with Vijeo Designer 5.0 on a recent project and, overall, found it rather enjoyable to work with.  Vijeo Designer is the Schneider Electric / Telemecanique programming software for the Magelis XBT-GT HMI's along with several other SCADA platforms. The creation of variables let me organize my I/O into logical folders, the alarm setup was intuitive and let me creat... [Read the rest of this blog...]

For a DMC engineer it is not atypical to be faced with outdated, legacy technology.  Finding information on old industrial hardware, unfortunately, isn't as easy as looking up technical support on your new Dell computer.  The web of what corporation owns and supports a product line can quickly get unbearably complicated, but here are a few tips and tricks to help you find the answers you are looking for...

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It’s a common problem: “I have an ASP .Net data entry form and all of my users are mad at me because they closed their browser and they lost their unsaved data!” If I had a dollar for every time I had to re-enter my shipping address because I used my back button when the site creator didn’t want me to… well I’d have enough dollars to make the mistake a few more times, probably buying robot p... [Read the rest of this blog...]

On a recent project, I was given an interesting challenge by a customer using SharePoint.  Basically the desire was to have a recursive "For loop" function in SharePoint using nothing but native tools (i.e. workflows).  Googling the subject, I found very little helpful information, but I was able to come up with a workable solution of my own and thought it was worth b... [Read the rest of this blog...]

When creating data entry forms in ASP .NET, the JavaScript onbeforeonload event can add a huge improvement to the end user experience. This nifty little event is fired before a page is unloaded (duh) and will keep users from navigating off of a page (and even from closing their browser) when they have unsaved changes on a data entry form. The onbeforeunload event behaves a bit oddly for an e... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Anyone who has ever visited the DMC office probably has made a trip into the friendly 'DMC Annex'.  The 'Annex' (which is not really an annex at all, but rather a sub-office in need of a name due to its friendly welcoming attitude) is home to 3 of our top engineers, Nick Shea, Kristie Simon, and, of course, myself...

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Recently I was using OneNote to compile a lot of test data from Excel and ran into a problem.  My data was in a number of different worksheets and when I dragged and dropped the Excel file as a printout into OneNote, I only got 1 of the sheets, not all of the many sheets of data.

I didn't want to keep inserting the sheets 1 by 1 so I looked into it and I figured out how to get the whole workbook into OneNote in 1 fell swoop...

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A few weeks ago, I was coerced by my girlfriend into buying one of those silly "floor cleaning robots".  Yes, I mean a Roomba.  I was skeptical, but I sat down and did some research.  Little did I know that while I had been slaving away religiously vacuuming my own floors (ok, occasionally vacuuming my own floors…)

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