Zachary Gracia

02/26/2019

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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 ...

Nic John

02/24/2019

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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...

Sophia Dolan

02/22/2019

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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...

David Berno

02/21/2019

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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....

Lillian Walker

02/21/2019

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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....

Alexander Yared

02/21/2019

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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 ...

Josh Zimmerle

02/20/2019

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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...

Alex Bernard

02/13/2019

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Modern industrial communication is often performed over Ethernet protocols, especially within the Siemens product ecosystem. However, some external devices (especially non-Siemens devices) communicate using serial protocols. Luckily, Siemens provides...

Kevin Best

02/07/2019

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In this blog, I’ll walk you through the basic commissioning steps to get a brand-new Allen-Bradley PLC and HMI up and running. All the information covered here is also available in Rockwell’s help documentation, but I tried to distill out...

Ryan Lake

01/18/2019

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I was recently on site with a client to commission a Siemens G120 VFD. This particular VFD was being used to drive a blower motor and inflate an airbag. The client required hard-wired manual control of the motor, in addition to controlling it from th...