DMC will be attending Siemens Food & Beverage Digitalization Day on November 28, 2018. This event will take place at the Hackberry Creek Country Club in Irving, Texas.  Food and Beverage Digitalization Day aims to share industry best practices that spur innovation through digitalization. A series of panels and presentations will address ways to increase productivity and efficiency, increase performance, improve safety and quality, and increase sales and customer focus. D...

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The DMC Boston office hosted their third annual Yearly Office Event (YOE) in Cape Cod this year. The YOE is an awesome opportunity for DMC employees from every office to come together for a fun weekend full of a variety of activities. Each office hosts one YOE event per year, and it is partially sponsored by DMC. Last year, the Boston crew headed to the mountains of New Hampshire. This year, the Boston crew returned to Cape Cod. We decided to hit the beach and rented out a series of hous...

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window.onload = function() {var aCodes = document.getElementsByTagName('pre');for (var i=0; i Of all the unanswered questions of the universe, the one that consistently keeps me up at night is this: In Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, if recovering the Death Star plans were so vital to the security of the Galactic Empire, why would you send Storm Troopers to do a job that a machine could do just as well, especially if the machine would be immune to Jedi mind tricks?  To prove to mys...

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I am excited to announce the launch of the Chicago WIT Network! WIT (Women in Technology) is a community of professionals across the world that believe in making it easier for women to imagine, begin, and develop a career in IT. There are over 80 chapters in over 40 countries that provide a vast and varied network of events, contacts, and opportunities. As co-chair of the Chicago WIT chapter, I am especially excited to further WIT’s mission: Build a global community of l...

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DMC Senior Consultant Michael Dannemiller will lead a Power BI "Dashboard in a Day" hands-on training workshop at the Microsoft Technology Center in Chicago on Tuesday, November 6 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Microsoft in partnership with DMC, Inc. are pleased to offer this one-day workshop covering the capabilities of Power BI. The goal of this workshop is to help you understand how to analyze your data in a rich and compelling way.  You are enc...

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WinCC Advanced provides a way to monitor the heartbeat of the HMI through an area pointer called coordination word. PLC can monitor this life bit and find out when the HMI gets disconnected. This blog shows you how to monitor the HMI life bit on a Siemens PLC. Create a data block variable of type Word called wCoordinationWord and open HMI connections in Portal. After you select the HMI connection that is linked to your PLC, select the area pointer tab. Enable the Coordination area point...

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DMC is excited to announce that we are now Ignition 7.9 CORE certified. Project Engineer Elizabeth Hill passed the Ignition Core Certification exam designed to test understanding and knowledge of Ignition. The test covers Ignition architecture, real-time status and control, historical data logging, UDTs and templates, and alarming. Testing & Certification The test itself consists of two parts and takes an average of eight hours to complete. Part one, Troubleshooting Prompt...

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Power BI is a fantastic tool for creating visually appealing reports to analyze numerous sources of data. Report creation is often as simple as dragging and dropping if the data available is appropriately formatted. However, this is not always the case. Fortunately, Power BI contains a powerful Query Editor that allows you to transform your data into exactly the form you need. Below is a list of features that can make life easier! To access the query editor, navigate to the home tab, and clic...

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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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Siemens' S7-PLCSIM Advanced allows simulation of functions while configuring and engineering without a physical connection. Overall, PLCSIM Advanced implements many improvements over PLCSIM including simulation for the web server, OPC UA, distributed IO, and many more. Below are a couple tips and tricks I’ve used to get started with PLCSIM Advanced. Tip One: Downloading To PLCSIM Advanced Downloading to PLCSIM Advanced is a little different for a developer accustomed...

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As a recent new hire, I spent my first three weeks in the Chicago office for training before heading to my home office in St. Louis. Because I was taking the Amtrak train from Chicago to St. Louis, I was asked to transport one of our "ball demos" for a career fair in the coming week. The ball demo is a tilt-table which uses feedback control to roll a ping pong ball to any arbitrary point on the surface of an iPad. We typically use the ball demos as a talking point during coll...

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Have you ever been commissioning a new PLC late in the afternoon when something goes wrong? Yeah, us too. The other night, we faced the problem below and the solution blew our minds, so I had to share it. We were setting the IP Address on a new Allen Bradley CompactLogix PLC using Rockwell's BootP utility. When we tried to submit our changes, we go the following error: Credit: Rockwell Automation Error message text: "Communication Error. Failed to complete the requested ...

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Starting at DMC As I started working at DMC, I was immediately amazed by the company culture. The company introduced me to the kitchen full of free food and drinks, I have already been to multiple happy hours as well as a welcome party, and I got the chance to plan out my welcome party that took place a few weeks ago. Moving to Chicago As a new member of the Chicago community, I figured I have to explore the area and familiarize myself with my new surroundings. There is so much to see a...

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What happens when a bunch of people who solve problems, aka puzzles, for a living go to an escape room? For my welcome party, we decided to find out! After pizza and happy hour at the office, the DMC Denver crew walked over to Puzzah! Escape Rooms to put our puzzle solving skills to the test. When we arrived, we split into three groups, and the Puzzah! staff read us the rules of the game: no unplugging wires, breaking down doors, or forcibly removing things from the walls. All the u...

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DMC is excited to present two presentations at the PCC Okterberfest: Tap Into Technology event taking place on Thursday, September 27th, 2018 at the Washington County Fair Park & Conference Center in West Bend, WI. Expect a day of seminars, workshops, a technology automation fair, hands-on product stations, and one-on-one discussions with experts.  Be sure to stop by the DMC booth and check out our DrinkBot demo! Also, don't miss out on presentations from DMC'...

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DMC recently hosted Daymon Thompson and Mike Rauch of Beckhoff Automation who shared with DMC the latest updates on the TwinCAT (The Windows Control and Automation Technology) platform. TwinCAT is a software system from Beckhoff that can turn almost any PC into one or multiple controllers for real-time systems. As the TwinCAT product manager for North America, Daymon was able to give us some insider information on exciting new features coming soon to TwinCAT, as well as a lot of insight in...

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Siemen’s TIA Portal provides quite a few useful features that make it very easy to update and maintain code. Updating projects from one version to the next is as easy as opening the project in the newer version of Portal. However, there are times when you want to revert a project to an older version of TIA Portal, something that Portal cannot do. That’s where TIA Portal Openness can help. For those looking to revert projects from V15 to V14, this post will outline the pr...

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Want to use SAFECONF to program your TRISAFE-S Phoenix Contact Safety Module? Luckily, this free software (available to registered users here), is intuitive and easy to use for even beginner automation programmers. Below is a guide to performing some key tasks using the software. In order to make this Tutorial easer to navigate, I've included quick links below to jump straight to your topic of interest: Create a New Project Create your Password Configure your I/O Redundant...

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On August 16th, DMC's St. Louis office celebrated our Grand Opening. The party started with technologically advanced cocktails and Siemens-powered ice cream and ended with a Cardinals Game that evening. Although we've been doing business in St. Louis since last spring, the event marked the first official DMC St. Louis party in our newly renovated Richmond Heights office space. We were thrilled to host several of our partners and customers for a night filled with food, drinks...

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I’ve recently been looking into some of NI’s latest and greatest products, specifically SystemLink and NI Package Manager. They’re both exciting new developments for the NI community, with great promise for the future of LabVIEW and test and measurement applications. They also are providing DMC with a great benefit in the near term. Before I dive into the detail of how we’re using these two products, I’ll provide a brief overview for any readers who may be unfami...

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