Every DMC office has at least one table sport at its heart. For Denver, this game is pool. So on FedEx Day 2016 Otto, Tyler, and I set out to automate our office Spencer Marston pool table. What does this look like you may ask? Our goal was to a...
DMC is excited to announce the release of the Siemens Open Library. The Siemens Open Library was developed by DMC, Inc. over several years. In partnership with Siemens Industry, we've improved, documented, and released this series of function blo...
The Siemens Automation Summit is one of our favorite events every year for sharing best practices and industry innovations. The 2016 Siemens Automation Summit will be held from June 27-30 at the Aria Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada. I...
FANUC offers an easy way to command and configure a robot from a PC using their PC Developer's Kit (PCDK).The kit allows a PC to access variables, registers, IO, programs, positions, and alarms on the robot. Most of the help documentation already...
DMC proudly hosted the inaugural Chicagoland Siemens User Group (ChUG) meeting at our office on April 7, 2016. The event was the first in an ongoing initiative to grow the local Siemens User Community. The first ChUG meeting drew a fantastic ...
For my very first project at DMC, I was tasked with setting up a file handling system through B&R Automation Studio 3. The application was to create a CSV file, populate the file with the revelant information, and then move the file to a new fold...
For one of our office parties, DMC's Boston office made an automatic bartender by utilizing industrial automation equipment. Before we disassembled it, we made a '90s style infomercial. The blog linked above has much more detail on how we ...
Recently, I was working with a client that was using TwinCAT 3 and Beckhoff drives to control machinery. One night, as they were running this machine, the drive faulted. Without any diagnostic message visible on the HMI, they were completely in the d...
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...
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...