Jon Carson

01/29/2013

5 Comments

Siemens offers useful tools for accessing both Simatic and SiMotion projects programmatically, in the form of registered COM Type Library DLLs. These tools offer many exciting possibilities (well, it does if you're like me, and get excited by thi...

Frank Riordan

01/03/2013

0 Comments

I'm always trying to get my daughters, ages 8 & 5, interested in what we do here at DMC. It's a challenge because I have a hard enough time explaining what DMC does to someone I meet at a cocktail party, never mind a couple of young kids....

Jon Carson

01/02/2013

2 Comments

There are many good options for automation and controls redundancy out there. Here is an example we just recently used in the field. The customer specified a requirement of complete redundancy for all IT, networking, and HMI components of one of a la...

Jason Mayes

10/16/2012

2 Comments

A few weeks ago I had the chance to experiment with serial communications using a Siemens S7-1200 PLC outfitted with a CM1241 (RS-485 module). Due to the limited number of projects we've had using the 1200 line of PLCs, this was an office first. ...

Cesar Pena

10/16/2012

0 Comments

One of the most interesting and fun projects I have worked at DMC was to develop a Dimensional Measurement system for our customer LTS Scale.   In a nutshell, the system calculates the volume of an object on a forklift pallet. ...

Jason Mayes

08/15/2012

7 Comments

Today, I found myself setting up some simple point-to-point serial communication on a Siemens S7-1200. For the current application, I was writing a simple function block to broadcast data to a Red Lion serial slave display, but there are a varie...

Danny Budzinski

08/09/2012

0 Comments

The days have certainly flown by, and, I’m sad to say, NI Week 2012 has run its course. The last day was shorter and leaner than the others, so, unfortunately, none of the sessions really stood out to me. I did learn a little more abo...

Danny Budzinski

08/07/2012

0 Comments

It’s already day 2 of NI Week 2012, and it feels like things are really moving fast. In the same way, I broke out my goals for NI Week, I’ve been trying to focus each of the 4 days more or less on a specific theme. In light of that, I too...

Danny Budzinski

08/05/2012

2 Comments

I know it might be hard to believe given my LabVIEW Architect status and 5+ years’ experience, but I arrived in muggy-but-nice Austin, TX this afternoon for my very first NI Week. No matter what the weather has been like in Chicago this summer,...

Jimmy Condon

07/10/2012

1 Comments

Most Human Machine Interfaces (HMI) are in a static location. Sometimes, this can be inconvenient if you need to check a device (motor, valve, diverter, etc.), but the sight line from the HMI is blocked and you need to be able to watch the device mov...