The holidays are here again. The decorations: tinsel and faux snow. And when the weather outside is frightful, you track in a lot of real snow and dirt. It got me thinking, I don't really want to clean up after everything, but I could f...
DMC started as a motion integrator (the M stands for motion). Even though we do a great many other things these days, we still maintain a strong competency in this area. We were recently contacted by a client who has an old Acroloop 2000 ISA based...
Sometimes, it's difficult to articulate exactly what type of work DMC does day to day. For example, in a career fair setting a DMC employee might only have a few minutes to describe our projects to a candidate. It quickly became apparent to us th...
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...
When choosing a piece of hardware, you will likely be confronted with many options from different vendors for what interface (PCI, PXI, USB, Serial/GPIB, LXI) that device will use to communicate with your software controller, so how do you choose? ...
I liked Firefox. It had tabbed browsing before Internet Explorer (IE) and seemed lighter and faster. The plug-ins were also a great feature, especially IE Tab, which ran IE from within Firefox. It was very easy to change the rendering engine and you ...
Looking back over the last three years of implementing SharePoint solutions for a wide variety of clients (large and small), I would say this is the number one question clients ask me when looking to get started on their first SharePoint portal solut...
On a recent project in Guangzhou, China, I had an opportunity to join a soccer outing with guys from our client's factory. Ok, so maybe it wasn't a FIFA World Cup caliber match, but we had a great time pitting the engineering department ve...
Encapsulating your data into custom Data Structures will allow you to Dominate (maybe not the world, but at least your PLC) I'm going to conclude my series on the IEC 61131-3 standard by examining the benefits of Data Structures. (If you misse...
For a recent DMC project I had the pleasure of working with Pickering Interfaces, a well-known international PXI hardware vendor, to supply an off-the-shelf PXI card which can simulate 6 chemical battery cells. Since such a product did not exist at t...