DMC invites you to attend a complimentary wine tasting hosted by our clients at Zaca Mesa Winery and Vineyards on Thursday, October 27. The event will be held at DMC's Chicago office from 6 to 8 p.m. Join Zaca Mesa General Manager, Paul Pease, to taste through a selection of new releases and favorite wines as we bring the vineyard experience to you. Enjoy an interactive wine tasting and video presentation that showcases the beauty and flavors of Zaca Mesa. We will be pouring sev...

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Two years ago, I had the opportunity to meet a high-ranking US Senator. One thing that stuck with me was how seriously he took Chinese cyber espionage. Was it really possible that our phones could spy on us, even when powered down, unless the battery is removed? I was skeptical, but since then, we’ve learned of the reality of incurable spyware that lives on your hard drive’s firmware, and seen countless high-profile cyber-attacks that can bring even the largest companies to their ...

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A few times a year, DMC holds an All Day Company Meeting (ADCM) in each of our offices. These offsite meetings are an opportunity for all employees in that office to get together, discuss goals, and have some fun. Our past ADCMs have provided us unique experiences like ziplining in Wisconsin, ice skating, and even a Ferris Bueller-style day in Chicago. This ADCM focused on a few different topics. The day started with small group discussions on our core values and customer service fundame...

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DMC has been doing business in our New York office since last spring, but now that our pool table is installed, we're excited to invite you inside. You're cordially invited to join us for DMC New York's Grand Opening party on October 20, 2016!   DMC New York's Grand Opening Party 4 - 10 p.m. 141 W 36th St;, Suite 20N New York, NY 10018 [Directions] About the Party Join us in celebrating our Grand Opening with some Big Apple-sized fun! We will also be com...

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Visitors to DMC may notice our ever-changing "Quote Board," documenting the most infamous utterances of the moment.

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DMC and Siemens recently co-hosted a webinar on "Developing PLC and HMI Code Faster Through Use of the Siemens Open Library." I joined Carson Kennedy of Siemens in presenting a free, 45-minute educational webinar that was originally introduced at the 2016 Siemens Automation Summit.  The Siemens platforms have always encouraged the use of modular, reusable, and object oriented code. Until recently, this meant that everyone was responsible for creating and maintaining their own i...

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At NIWeek this year, there were a few sessions that I really enjoyed focusing on user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design in LabVIEW. I take a personal interest in designing intuitive and aesthetic interfaces for my applications. Here are a few tips I learned from NIWeek. #1: Classic, Flat Controls Modern user interfaces tend to use flat or semi-flat UI graphics. Flat design became popular around 2012.  By this time, users were more comfortable with digital mediums than sim...

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Part of the fun of working at DMC is the activity fund budget we get to use for monthly fun events. One of our new favorite things to do is buy pizza and fly some of the drones (quadcopters) we have around the park outside our office.  Before doing so, we made sure we were following all local regulations and rules regarding flying drones. Since we were flying for fun, and all the drones were under 0.55 lbs, we didn't need to worry about most of the new FAA rules.   &n...

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SharePoint forms are usually very simple in terms of validation. The only out-of-the-box feature is to make a field required. While this is useful, sometimes businesses want more control over what users should and should not enter into a form. Fortunately, it is easy to write our own code to extend the validation of a SharePoint form. SharePoint Form Background When the save button is pressed on a SharePoint form, the PreSaveItem function is called. That function is as follows: ```...

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In a previous blog I discussed programming motion control with a S7-1500 with Technology Objects in TIA Portal. This is a very popular method of doing the motion control on the PLC. We can also offload the motion control to the drive control unit using Siemens’ library motion blocks such as SINA_POS and allow the PLC to control more drives. The Siemens library motion blocks are also available for S7-300 PLCs, which do not support the same Technology Objects as S7-1500 PLC...

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Each month, a different DMC office location gives the rest of the company an update. In the spirit of OneDMC, it helps keep us all connected and up-to-date on the latest employees, projects, and events. Though a PowerPoint is generally required, some offices kick things up a notch with a video finale. These videos are kept on top secret lockdown until they're unveiled at our monthly company meetings to much anticipation.   When the baton was last passed to Houston, we proudly presente...

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DMC will host the Chicagoland LabVIEW User's Group meeting on Wednesday, September 7, 2016. We've had the pleasure of hosting local LabVIEW developers for several years, and we're excited to open our space to the community. Agenda Channel wires are here! We'll begin the session by discussing this new way of communicating data amongst parallel loops. Whether you love them, hate them, or just don't understand them, come learn about channel wires and share your though...

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Michael Phelps has clearly made a splash in the Rio Olympics. The 31 year-old swimmer has grabbed a hefty six medals in this Olympics alone. Retiring with a grand total of 28 medals, Phelps is most decorated Olympian of all time. If this didn't already make him an American hero, the record medal count that he crushed was last held by Larisa Latynina of the Soviet Union with 18 medals. He also tops out the list of most individual gold medals with 13, breaking a record last set in 152 BCE...

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This guide will get you started with Beckhoff PLCs by showing step by step how to go online with an existing PLC to monitor or troubleshoot existing code on a running PLC. To upload the code from the PLC for modification or backup, just follow step 1. Upload PLC code Open the TwinCAT XAE in Visual Studio. Select File > Open > Open Project From Target… Select the PLC, then OK. See this guide for finding and connecting to a PLC. Select location on local compute...

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This guide will get you started with Beckhoff PLCs by showing step by step how to connect to a Beckhoff PLC.     Download and install Beckhoff TwinCAT 3 programming environment. Once the programming environment is installed, this icon  will appear in the system tray. Select > Router > Edit Routes. In the TwinCAT Static Routes window that pops up, select Add... The Add Route Dialog will appear:  For most situations, the Broadcast Search option wi...

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DMC Chicago is back on the links! Using DMC's Activity Fund, nine DMCers hit the course after work in hopes of finding some lost birdies and maybe even an eagle. The weather leading up to the event was dire, with all weather services reporting a 70 percent chance of thunderstorms for each hour we were scheduled to be on the course. We were hopeful as we trekked about 30 minutes from the office to the beautiful Sydney Marovitz Golf Course along Lake Michigan. Wou...

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Join John Sullivan of DMC and Carson Kennedy of Siemens for a 45-minute educational webinar on Wednesday, August 24 at 2 p.m. EST. John Sullivan will present on "Developing PLC and HMI Code Faster Through Use of the Siemens Open Library."             The Siemens platforms have always encouraged the use of modular, reusable, and object oriented code. Until recently, this meant that everyone was responsible for creating and maintaining ...

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DMC invites you to join us for our first Oktoberfest celebration in Denver on Thursday September 22, 2016! After the success of our Oktoberfest events in Chicago and Boston, the Denver team is excited to host their inaugural Oktoberfest Denver-style. Come on out for an evening of food, beer, and fun. DMC Denver's Oktoberfest Party September 22, 2016 4 - 10 p.m. 1860 Blake St., Suite 410 Denver, CO 80202 [Directions] About the Party Join us in celebrating Oktoberfest wit...

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Recently, I found the need to create customizable text for some alarms in a TIA Portal project. In this particular case, I needed to include the name of the operator that was monitoring the machine for traceability, as well as some specific machine information (process tag value) when the alarm occurred. Knowing this must be possible, I set off to Google, the Siemens forums, and the TIA Portal help files. Surprisingly, I was not able to find very good documentation or examples online. Howev...

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Engineers are known for being serious about their work, but we leave plenty of room for laughs. At DMC, we have a fondness for humor of the geeky variety. This month, humor takes flight when the office gets a quadcopter.

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