Version 3.0 has just been released for the Siemens Open Library. This is by far the largest update since the initial release of the library and includes changes for TIA Portal V14 SP1. COMING SOON: A TIA Portal V15 version of the Siemens Open Library that includes full simulation for all devices! Major Updates Twenty-nine newly supported blocks! Including brand new blocks such as Digital Output, Siwarex Load Cell Modules, Hydraulic Valve, Danfoss VFDs and more! Full document...

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DMC is always growing and has alumni from schools around the US and world including many alumni from both Notre Dame and Northwestern University. With so many supporters of both teams, it was exciting to find out that these two football teams would be playing each other in Evanston, Illinois near our flagship Chicago office. DMC employees from Chicago and even employees from various other offices came together and made use of DMC's activity fund to tailgate before watching their alma m...

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One of DMC's annual traditions is having an off-site All Day Company Meeting (ADCM) where everyone takes the day off project work to learn, share knowledge, team-build, and spend time together outside of the office. Our ADCMs have taken us everywhere from ice skating in Chicago to roaming historic Boston. These company meetings are a chance for our offices to combine forces as well. This year, Chicago and St. Louis combined for their ADCM as did our offices on the West Coast. Our All Day ...

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Visitors to DMC may notice our ever-changing "Quote Board," documenting the best engineering jokes and employee one-liners of the moment.

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React has quickly become one of DMC’s favorite tools for web frontend development due to its component-based structure and growing adoption. However, between the JSX syntax, component lifecycle, and state management, learning to use React effectively sometimes feels like learning a language in and of itself.  If you're getting your feet wet in React, here are some of DMC’s top tips for making components. 1. Make Lots of Components React’s component-based st...

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DMC was proud to be recognized by Mayor Rahm Emanuel as a leader in Chicago’s technology industry at Tech Day on November 28. DMC joined fellow tech leaders from 16 companies who have added or will be adding a combined 2,000 jobs in Chicago in 2018 and 2019. As DMC's Marketing Manager, I represented DMC at the event, which offered an opportunity to celebrate industry growth while fostering continued collaboration within the tech sector. The event was held at ActiveCampaign and hoste...

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Interactivity, or input from a user, is expected in almost every type of mobile or desktop application, website, or interface. Users enter personal information, change application settings, and navigate various menus while using an interface. As designers, it is our job to provide users with the correct controls to make these inputs easier and quicker. Two of the most common controls, toggle switches and checkboxes, appear to accomplish the same task and often get their use cases confuse...

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To say that this was not what I expected when I signed on as a Systems Engineer at DMC is a correct statement. One month into my job, 50 of us were going to see Hamilton (yes...that Hamilton) on the company’s dime. Not only that, but everyone was at the show to welcome four other employees and myself to the company. The Hamilton Welcome Party was just the latest in a slew of company-sponsored welcome parties. Each new employee gets a welcome party. It's an excellent way to connect w...

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The ability to access a SQL database in real time from WinCC runtime can be beneficial for manufacturing processes. It can be used to determine what should be run on a line, log parameters of a process, or provide tracking of products in real time. This tutorial will go through some of the steps necessary to access data from an SQL database with WinCC advanced. An important note is that SQL access is not allowed through scripting from a Siemens Comfort Panel. One way to work around this&...

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The DMC activity fund is a long-standing tradition DMC created to support employee planned events so that we can all hang out with each other while we aren't working and have some fun. We've done everything from skydiving in Reno to deep sea fishing in Houston. But, where were we on November 13, 2018? I’m sure you remember where you were. How can you forget? The St. Louis office knows. The St. Louis office will certainly never forget. Witnessing History That was the n...

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Each month, everyone at DMC meets in person or by video conference for a monthly company meeting. We share knowledge, introduce new employees to the company, celebrate anniversaries, and much more.  However, what we often most look forward to are office update videos! This DMC tradition started in our Boston office a few years ago and quickly spread to Houston. From there, it was only a matter of time before all the DMC offices were competing to see who can make the funniest office ...

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After training in Chicago and kicking off my career at DMC by helping out in Reno, I finally made my way back to my home office of Houston. Being back permitted me to have my very own welcome party which every employee at gets. Everyone chooses their own party location and it's a great chance to get to know more people at DMC. I thought, what better activity to do to bond with an office full of men than to make bath bombs at my favorite cruelty-free, vegan-friendly cosmetic...

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DMC uses our own internal suggestion box as one of the many avenues to answer these two "WWTBTSCD" questions: What would the best technical solutions company to work WITH do? What would the best technical solutions company to work FOR do? We receive a pretty large range of suggestions varying from requesting more gear in the gym to improving project staffing. DMC genuinely cares about what employees think, and we take every suggestion under consideration. We recently r...

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DMC Senior Consultant Michael Dannemiller led a Power BI “Dashboard in a Day” workshop at the Microsoft Technology Center in Chicago earlier this month. The goal of the workshop was to help participants understand how to analyze their data in a rich and compelling way. We started the day off with coffee, breakfast and an introduction to Power BI and the benefits of the platform. Michael gave a high-level overview of the uses of Power BI and the different dashboards participan...

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One of the many perks of joining DMC is that whenever new employees come onboard, welcome parties are planned to celebrate the occasion. David Wylen and I chose to have our welcome party be a cocktail making class at the Chicago Distilling Company. The event proved to be more informative than expected, but as much fun as we hoped. It then dawned on me, with the help of a Russian mule, that the process of making a cocktail is an excellent analogy to the process I underwent when I joined DMC. P...

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DMC is proud to announce that we're expanding to Dallas! Just a four-hour drive from our Houston office, the new Dallas location will help strengthen DMC's presence in the booming economic regions of North Texas and Oklahoma. While we are targeting Summer 2019 for the official opening, we're actively supporting current customers from our Houston office and building new relationships in the area. I'm excited for the opportunity to lead the new DMC Dallas tea...

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Last February, DMC visited Beckhoff’s U.S. headquarters in Savage, MN for a training course on their new TwinCAT HMI platform. We were very impressed by the platform and have since had some successful implementation on projects. Here are a couple of the features integrated into Beckhoff’s new HMI worth taking note of: Web-based Control and Monitoring WYSIWYG Web Page Design Development in Visual Studio Easy Extention and Customization Read on for more details...

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In October, DMC Chicago said goodbye our desks and hello to a build site as we volunteered with Habitat for Humanity to assist in building more affordable housing for people in need. Decent, affordable housing opportunities matter for our Chicago neighbors and Habitat for Humanity not only aids in building the homes, but they contribute to the purchase of the house and help with education on home maintenance and financial management. This is why nine of our employees bundled up on a bliste...

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Visitors to DMC may notice our ever-changing "Quote Board," documenting the best engineering jokes and employee one-liners of the moment.

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When using Telerik to graph in .NET, there are some tips and tricks to remember. Refer to Using Telerik to Create Multi-Series Plots in .NET for the basis of this blog. Populate Your Chart with Data – Series Provider In Using Telerik To Create Multi-Series Plots in .NET, you saw an example of how to add data to a chart using a series. This was easy to do, but included a lot of repetition if you needed multiple items to be plotted. To make this easier and more extensible, we c...

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