Cesar Pena

12/17/2009

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There are certain control systems, such as in nuclear power plants and airplanes, that cannot be disabled or shut down, even momentarily, because of the threat to people’s lives. In these applications, a redundant control system must be in plac...

Jon Carson

11/17/2009

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Ever wanted to use those very nice looking Siemens touchpad HMIs with a third party controller Siemens doesn't officially support? On a recent project I was presented with the following scenario: a customer already had several Siemens touch-scree...

Nick Shea

10/13/2009

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After working on several projects with Siemens S7-300 Safety PLCs, I was given the opportunity to contribute to an article for ControlDesign.com that presents cases for and against replacing hardware components with software solutions in machine cont...

Nick Shea

10/09/2009

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While commissioning the automation controls for a manufacturing line, I acquired some tips and tricks for configuring a Profibus network on a Simatac 505 (formerly known as a TI 505). Using 505 Workshop version 4.32 development environment from Fastr...

Kristie Simon Shea

09/30/2009

8 Comments

A simple yet common problem when programming a Siemens Simatic S7-300 PLC is losing the data already stored in the PLC after downloading an updated data block. If you are simply adding items to the end of a flat data block (not adding items to a u...

Jon Carson

09/08/2009

1 Comments

Once you are familiar with their capabilities and methodologies, Siemens PLCs have the potential to make controls programming quicker and easier than ever. With support for function blocks, text-based programming, libraries, and user defined types, S...

Kristie Simon Shea

05/22/2009

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During this past week, DMC had the opportunity to work with Kevin Johnson of ILF Technologies at the DMC office. ILF, located in Romeoville, IL, produces web finishing products for the printing and converting industries. The machine we are current...

Frank Riordan

05/15/2009

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A Solar Panel Assembly Project that DMC recently completed was the basis for a feature article in Design World Magazine. The article can be found here. DMC provided controls engineering and programming services for a company that makes machines th...