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...

Jimmy Condon

01/17/2019

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DMC has found that more of our customers need their PLCs in remote locations to be able to not only report data to a central server but also be capable of accepting commands from the central server. If this sounds a lot like the Internet of T...

Will Todd

01/15/2019

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Working at a client site alongside Andrew Neill, we came across an unusual integration scenario. The machine we were providing commissioning support for was equipped with a Siemens 1518 safety controller and had numerous Siemens and Beckhoff com...

Kevin Best

01/12/2019

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Manually adding alarms in FactoryTalk View can be tedious. When you have a system with lots and lots of devices, as DMC often does, this can become nearly impossible. That’s why during one of our annual FedEx days, DMC engineers built a custom ...

John Michael Frullo

01/11/2019

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Certain control systems require operation 24/7, 365. That is: these systems should always be in action! In such applications, a fault in the controller or computer could prove disastrous. Therefore, redundant systems are introduced to handle automati...

Joe Kraemer

01/08/2019

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Creating tags in a Wonderware InTouch HMI project that connect to your Allen-Bradley PLC is quick and easy for small projects. However, on projects with hundreds or thousands of tags, it can become time consuming! To speed up this proces...

Jeff McCormick

12/10/2018

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Version 3.0 has just been released for the Siemens Open Library. This is by far the largest update since the initial release of the library and includes changes for TIA Portal V14 SP1. COMING SOON: A TIA Portal V15 version of the Siemens Open Libr...