Boris Cherkasskiy

01/27/2016

2 Comments

It seems like lately the Force has awakened everywhere. The only corner of the universe that was still dark and quiet was the PLC and factory automation galaxy. To fill the gap I decided to show PLCs the way of the Force. And what could be better tha...

Nicklas Thystrup

01/21/2016

0 Comments

Often it becomes necessary to read a few tags from another Beckhoff PLC without setting up a full publisher subscriber EAP system. Automation Device Specification (ADS) reads and writes can be used to do this with very minimal setup, as lon...

Leon Grossman

01/14/2016

2 Comments

There are occasions when a Siemens PLC may need to be commissioned with a different IP address than the one assigned in the project. In the case of a single PLC, this is no big deal and it is a simple matter to update the project to match the IP addr...

Jason Mayes

12/30/2015

19 Comments

PLEASE NOTE: This blog was written using features available in TIA Portal V13 SP1 Update 1. Some of the functionality shown was removed in Update 3, specifically the ability to multiplex UDTs. Hopefully the rest of the information will be still be he...

Otto Gottlieb

12/21/2015

1 Comments

Recently I was working on an S7-300 PLC project that required a fairly advanced HMI, so we chose the Comfort Panel to use Faceplates for the many pop-ups and identical controls required. Creating these Faceplates was a great way to increase our produ...

Jon Carson

12/18/2015

0 Comments

DMC has expertise in both industrial and PC-based software development. In other words, we do a great deal of projects involving PLCs; but we also write plenty of complex PC-based apps. But my personal favorites are projects that combine the two. ...

Ryan Landwehr

11/06/2015

1 Comments

A recent DMC project for an OEM machine builder involved automatically generating log files for each machine. The twist? Each log file needed to be unique and easily traceable to the machine that generated it. This can be achieved using the PLC seria...

Sudeep Gowrishankar

11/05/2015

0 Comments

Have you ever received a tweet from a machine on the factory floor? These days, modern PLCs interact with the typical PC and Information Technology world (Ethernet, SMTP/emails, SMS/text messaging, cloud technologies), but there often are caveats....

Otto Gottlieb

10/30/2015

3 Comments

The creation and maintenance of data records for machines is a very important part of keeping machines running efficiently. For example, tracking downtime and uptime is crucial to provide proper maintenance on the machine, while logging stoppages and...

Nikhil Holay

10/02/2015

0 Comments

After spending some time working with multiplexed tags in Siemens Portal, I found that I was unable to set boolean values through a multiplexed tag. Instead of using a multiplexed tag, a simple script can help achieve the same function. The function ...