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Entries for February 2019

Microsoft's "Dashboard in a Day" Power BI Workshop Led by DMC for a Second Time

Two of DMC's Digital Workplace Solutions team members led another fantastic Dashboard in a Day event this month. DMC partnered with Microsoft to deliver the workshop, which took place at the Microsoft Technology Center in Chicago. Th...


Using a High-Speed Counter’s Hardware Interrupt to Peripherally Write to an Output on a Siemens 1200 PLC

The built-in high-speed counters on Siemens PLCs are very useful for applications in which a machine needs to move material a specified distance. In these instances, the scan time of the program can add inconsistency to this distance. Reduce this ...


5 Reasons Why DMC is One of the Best Places for an Engineer to Work

You’re looking for a job. Perhaps you’re in college and preparing to graduate, maybe you’re just out of college, or perhaps you’ve been working for a few years and you’re looking for a change of pace. Whatever your ...


DMC Will Lead "Dashboard in a Day" for a Third Time in Chicago

DMC has now led the Dashboard in a Day Power BI workshop twice in Chicago and has a workshop scheduled on March 27 in St. Louis. Microsoft has invited DMC back again to lead yet another another Power BI workshop in Chicago. On March 19, 2019, Seni...


Using the Siemens LCom Library for TCP Communication on S7 PLCs

In a recent project, we needed to set up communication between a PC running LabView and a Siemens S7-1500 PLC. Thankfully, Siemens provides the LCom communications library, shown below, for setting up TCP communications on SIMATIC S7-300/400, SIMATIC...


Implementing Custom Link Kinematics in Energid’s Actin SDK

Energid’s Actin SDK is a C++ robotic control toolkit that can be used to model and simulate almost any type of manipulator. Users can define a robotic system, specify tasks and constraints (such as dynamic collision avoidance), and the Actin sy...


Siemens WinCC Sm@rtServer Set-Up

As of TIA Portal V14, the built-in remote access utility called WinCC Sm@rtServer is now available to Basic Panels and no longer requires a separate license for Comfort Panels. This means that if you have a Comfort Panel-running device (version 14.0....


Configuring a WinCC Professional Trend to Update Start and End Times based on DateTime Tags

I was recently working on a project with a tricky trending feature: display a trend over the course of a batch while the batch is running. No matter how long the batch had been running, we wanted to show the process value for the length of the trend....


Custom Data Logging from a Siemens PLC to Microsoft SQL Using VBScript

DMC worked on a project where we wanted to log data to a local Microsoft SQL server to be able to save and display it using Microsoft Report Designer. However, the standard format of Siemens’ data log did not match up with the schema ...


Automation with an Arduino, PLC, or Custom Embedded Controls?

Automation and control come in a lot of different varieties and flavors. On the surface, Arduinos, PLCs, and embedded controls all appear to do the same function. So how do you determine which is best for your application? In this post, I’ll...


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