Entries for the 'Automation' Category

Siemens is hosting the 2015 Siemens Oil & Gas Innovations Conference at Minute Maid Park in Houston, Texas from April 22-April 23. As a Siemens Solution Partner and with a new office opening in Houston, Texas later this year, I am honored to represent DMC at this year’s conference. My presentation, Improving and Scaling SCADA Systems: Is WinCC OA Right for Me? will be a part of the Solution Partner Breakouts taking place on Wednesday, April 22. WinCC OA is similar to a traditional S...

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I have found little information for commissioning a Schneider Electric Lexium MDrive Stepper Motor and integrating it into a Siemens solution, so I decided to write about how I did it. Commissioning the MDrive Stepper Motor with the Schneider TCP Configuration Utility The software required for commissioning the drive is available for download on the Schneider Motion website. The software that I needed was the Lexium LMDxE TCP Configuration Utility Version 1.2.0.6 that includes the PROFINET...

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Sam Weber and I recently participated in two meetings for the Siemens MOM Expertise Alliance Center (MEAC). Sam and I spent two days discussing the future of Manufacturing Execution Systems and Manufacturing Operations Management (MES and MOM) with top experts from Siemens and other members of the SIMATIC IT ecosystem. DMC is excited to extend its partnership with Siemens SIMATIC IT by joining the Siemens MEAC.  By joining the CoE, DMC gains access to an outstanding partner network of ex...

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This article goes through setting up and using the Siemens S120 drive inside TIA Portal after it has been configured in STARTER. While several other Siemens drives can be started with Siemens Startdrive (G120, G120C, G120D, and G120P), performing a hardware configuration of an S120 drive is not yet integrated into TIA Portal. I have heard that the next big release will have this feature! TIA Portal Setup In this example project I’m using an S7-1500 CPU and a CU320 control unit as seen ...

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The built-in drive commissioning features in TIA Portal make it very simple to commission a Siemens G120 drive with a Siemens S7 PLC without the need for any stand-alone software. Drives can be commissioned quickly and easily, and afterwards all drive parameters will be stored in Portal for future reference. I have described the general process of setting up Profinet drives with safety in Portal step-by-step. Small details may vary with every situation, but the general process is as follows: ...

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DMC has recently been working closely with Siemens in expanding opportunities to utilize their Manufacturing Execution Systems and Manufacturing Operations Management platform, SIMATIC IT. One area we've pursued is development of a Line Monitoring tool to help manufacturers implement a cost effective way to measure Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and perform downtime analysis.   This result is a low cost solution built on a Siemens S7-1200 PLC and SIMATIC IT Line Montioring Syst...

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Have you ever been disappointed in the data logging options available on your Basic panel? Ever wished it were easier to set up logging directly to a database? Or perhaps you've wanted to set up some simple simulation or test sequences without modifying your PLC control code. If you have a little LabVIEW experience, you're in luck! Recently, I ran across an R&D scenario where we wanted to log some data from an S7-1500 PLC for analysis - a lot of data. We were using a TP1500 Comfor...

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When asked if we work with a particular technology here at DMC, my answer is always "yes". PLC, Embedded, Test and Measurement, Business Logic: we do it all and more. WinCC OA (OA) is the spiritual analogue to that philosophy in SCADA form. There are native drivers for Siemens and Allen Bradley PLCs as well as an OPC driver so it will work with nearly any modern controller. Supporting a wide range of hardware is expected of a product that is targeted to the same space as Wonderwa...

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As we enter the Christmas season, I can’t help but think back to this time last year. I was less than three months away from graduating college and faced with a big decision. It was only a few days before Christmas Eve, that I decided to start the next chapter of my life at DMC Boston. Before I knew it, June rolled around and I found myself on a city bus in Chicago heading into my first day of training at the Chicago office. I’d had summer internships in the past and felt like I had ...

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I recently had to troubleshoot an issue in which my servo drive was not responding to my PLC commands - as expected. In order to see the interaction between the PLC and the servo drive, I used the Network Command Trace.   Learn more about DMC's B&R Automation Studio Programming Services.

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As a National Instruments Alliance Member, DMC takes pride in delivering top-notch solutions for all NI related projects. We take our education and the custom solutions we deliver our clients seriously. We have worked particularly hard to maintain a high level of competency in National Instruments LabVIEW programming. DMC is honored to demonstrate our expertise by having the most LabVIEW Certified Architects in the Midwest, as well as an all over strong team of LabVIEW Certifie...

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I want to congratulate the Nobel Committee for recognizing the inventors of the Blue LED - a truly transformative technology. As an engineer working with machine vision systems I have been using LED lighting longer than most people. LEDs are great for their brightness, strobing capabilities, and consistent intensity over a long product life. The first time I saw a blue LED was in a trade show in 1998. One booth of lighting equipment has a light that was a brilliant deep blue. I asked the man ...

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For a couple of recent projects I needed to transfer a few bytes between Siemens PLCs. I had used PUTs and GETs in the past, which I find very useful for sending large amounts of data. But if I only need to send a few bytes or speed is critical, setting up one of the PLCs as slave to the other PLC can be more efficient. Siemens makes this quick to do with I-Device, and I’ll show a couple of examples below. S7-300 PLCs and Profibus, Both PLCs In The Same TIA Portal Project When u...

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Creating popup windows on HMI pages enhances the interaction between the operator and the machine. The creation of popup windows in Automation Studio involves many other important aspects of making an HMI more dynamic such as formatting layers on pages, controlling and using the HMI display in program code, and manipulating the statuses of HMI elements. If you are new to creating HMI pages with Automation Studio, then you can learn a lot from this video. Learn more about DMC's B&R Aut...

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Have a need to make data available from your S7-1200 PLC to a Modbus TCP Master (or SCADA)? Luckily, this is easy to setup. This will be short and sweet. Siemens provides two Instruction blocks for setting up Client/Server Modbus TCP connections – you can find them under Communication on the Instructions Window – MB_SERVER and MB_CLIENT. As an example, let’s set up a Modbus TCP server on our PLC. I’m starting a project from scratch, so I’m going to add an ...

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Datasources in Genesis64 are defined within the GridWorX64 application to cache data for display and use in the HMI. My experience with datasources has been as a link between a SQL server database and Genesis64. However, while developing an application that contained numerous datasources (40+), I ran into an issue that rendered the application unusable. This blog post describes the issue and a workaround. The Problem: Refreshing datasources with a time trigger takes an increasingly long amou...

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Over the course of the last few months, I have delved deep into the Genesis64 HMI/SCADA development software package by Iconics while working on a standardized solution for recipe editing in manufacturing lines. Overall, it is a competitive option when fast development time and web access are valued.  One of the features that enables fast development is the ability to use data from a SQL server database, a standard in many industries. Genesis64 uses an application called GridWorX64 Serve...

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From time to time, we'll run across situations where a client believes it is necessary to lock down code on a PLC. In some cases, there may be valuable intellectual property they would like to protect. In others, its purpose may be to prevent unauthorized modifications to safety-related code, or activation of disabled options. There may also be cases where it is necessary to interlock a PLC program to a specific memory card or CPU, especially in cases where there may be multiple, similar (bu...

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This year at National Instrument's annual conference, NIWeek, DMC was invited to present on "Real-world Techniques in High-Speed Vision Inspection." DMC is an NI Silver Alliance member with a specialization in vision. Ken Brey and I are Certified Vision Professionals and were excited for the chance to share some of the knowledge and experience we have gained through various vision inspection projects. We worked together with Dan McCarty, Sr. Software Manager at W.H. Leary Co. to cr...

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I've done a lot of PLC programming over the last few years. Siemens, Rockwell, Beckhoff, Mitsubishi, Panasonic... if it's IEC61131-3 compliant, I've probably written a few rungs on it. However, I recently ran across an interesting problem that completely stumped me. I was doing a quick test on an S7-1200 PLC (programmed in TIA Portal V13) where I needed to perform a non-time critical operation approximately once a second within a re-usable FB. The two rungs that confounded me and ...

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