Have you ever been commissioning a new PLC late in the afternoon when something goes wrong? Yeah, us too. The other night, we faced the problem below and the solution blew our minds, so I had to share it. We were setting the IP Address on a new Allen Bradley CompactLogix PLC using Rockwell's BootP utility. When we tried to submit our changes, we go the following error: Credit: Rockwell Automation Error message text: "Communication Error. Failed to complete the requested ...

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Starting at DMC As I started working at DMC, I was immediately amazed by the company culture. The company introduced me to the kitchen full of free food and drinks, I have already been to multiple happy hours as well as a welcome party, and I got the chance to plan out my welcome party that took place a few weeks ago. Moving to Chicago As a new member of the Chicago community, I figured I have to explore the area and familiarize myself with my new surroundings. There is so much to see a...

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What happens when a bunch of people who solve problems, aka puzzles, for a living go to an escape room? For my welcome party, we decided to find out! After pizza and happy hour at the office, the DMC Denver crew walked over to Puzzah! Escape Rooms to put our puzzle solving skills to the test. When we arrived, we split into three groups, and the Puzzah! staff read us the rules of the game: no unplugging wires, breaking down doors, or forcibly removing things from the walls. All the u...

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DMC is excited to present two presentations at the PCC Okterberfest: Tap Into Technology event taking place on Thursday, September 27th, 2018 at the Washington County Fair Park & Conference Center in West Bend, WI. Expect a day of seminars, workshops, a technology automation fair, hands-on product stations, and one-on-one discussions with experts.  Be sure to stop by the DMC booth and check out our DrinkBot demo! Also, don't miss out on presentations from DMC'...

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DMC recently hosted Daymon Thompson and Mike Rauch of Beckhoff Automation who shared with DMC the latest updates on the TwinCAT (The Windows Control and Automation Technology) platform. TwinCAT is a software system from Beckhoff that can turn almost any PC into one or multiple controllers for real-time systems. As the TwinCAT product manager for North America, Daymon was able to give us some insider information on exciting new features coming soon to TwinCAT, as well as a lot of insight in...

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Siemen’s TIA Portal provides quite a few useful features that make it very easy to update and maintain code. Updating projects from one version to the next is as easy as opening the project in the newer version of Portal. However, there are times when you want to revert a project to an older version of TIA Portal, something that Portal cannot do. That’s where TIA Portal Openness can help. For those looking to revert projects from V15 to V14, this post will outline the pr...

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Want to use SAFECONF to program your TRISAFE-S Phoenix Contact Safety Module? Luckily, this free software (available to registered users here), is intuitive and easy to use for even beginner automation programmers. Below is a guide to performing some key tasks using the software. In order to make this Tutorial easer to navigate, I've included quick links below to jump straight to your topic of interest: Create a New Project Create your Password Configure your I/O Redundant...

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On August 16th, DMC's St. Louis office celebrated our Grand Opening. The party started with technologically advanced cocktails and Siemens-powered ice cream and ended with a Cardinals Game that evening. Although we've been doing business in St. Louis since last spring, the event marked the first official DMC St. Louis party in our newly renovated Richmond Heights office space. We were thrilled to host several of our partners and customers for a night filled with food, drinks...

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I’ve recently been looking into some of NI’s latest and greatest products, specifically SystemLink and NI Package Manager. They’re both exciting new developments for the NI community, with great promise for the future of LabVIEW and test and measurement applications. They also are providing DMC with a great benefit in the near term. Before I dive into the detail of how we’re using these two products, I’ll provide a brief overview for any readers who may be unfami...

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Visitors to DMC may notice our ever-changing "Quote Board," documenting the best engineering jokes and employee one-liners of the moment.

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This year, the DMC Chicago office decided to keep things local and hosted our third annual Yearly Office Event (YOE) right here in the Windy City. Since most of us have already experienced most of the typical Chicago experiences, we decided to branch out a little and try some not-so-typical Chi-town activities. What is a YOE? First off, a YOE, or Yearly Office Event, is a fun weekend for employees from every office to gather at a specific DMC location. The event is partially sponsored...

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You are an engineer on site in Lebanon, Kansas. At sunrise on the vernal equinox, you hop in your hovercar and start driving directly toward the rising sun along the ground at a constant 60 mph. You continue driving in this way until the sun sets. What are your coordinates when you stop driving? Parameters •    Coordinates of Lebanon, Kansas: 39°48′38″N 98°33′22″W •    Vernal Equinox: September 22, 2018 • ...

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In our work with various organizations, DMC’s Digital Workplace Solutions team has found that many organizations have no formal onboarding process in place. Without an organized system, it is easy for key onboarding tasks to fall through the cracks resulting in employees arriving on their first day unable to begin working. Beyond the lost productivity of the new employee, a mismanaged onboarding process can cause frustration across departments, damage the employer’s brand, and hav...

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For Throwback Thursday this week, I made an amazing discovery. Hidden in the back of DMC Boston's pantry was our rather dusty waffle iron! Not too long ago, Friday mornings were consistently celebrated with waffles for breakfast as a way to ring in the weekend. Realizing that none of the newer engineers even knew we had a waffle maker, Adam and I decided to bring back Waffles for Business! Bright and early, we started whipping up some waffle batter, including gluten-free batter for our...

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DMC is excited to partner with CSIA in hosting an SI Regional Event at our Chicago office on September 5. The half-day event will include a lunch, tour of the DMDII (Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute), SI Discussion Roundtable, and networking event on DMC's rooftop deck. For the SI Discussion Roundtable, we aim to replicate a "roundtable" discussion format commonly used at peer group meetings. We ask the participants to submit questions in advance related to ...

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I recently worked on a project that required the use of data logging. However, the formatting of Siemen's data logging was not ideal for this implementation. So, I made my own version of data logging using Visual Basic scripts on my Comfort Panel that create and append to a CSV file. One of the first things to think about is where you want to store these logs. For Comfort Panels, you can access the onboard USB drive and the SD card slot via VBScript. You can also access a networ...

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Each post in the Siemens HMI Toolbox series highlights a native HMI object in the Siemens WinCC Comfort, Advanced, or Professional environments. It is our goal to help users become more familiar with HMI development by sharing some of our best practices and useful tools we have learned. This post focuses on the HTML Browser object. Overview: The HTML Browser object allows you to view simple HTML pages in your HMI runtime application. DMC has used this HMI element to serve many different...

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Like every child growing up, I admired airplanes soaring through the sky. They seemed not only majestic but proof of man’s infallible ingenuity and perseverance. The Wright Brothers showed the world we simply had to push the limits with an incredible feat of engineering and determination. I had the same gut reaction anyone else would have: “Man, it’d be fun to jump out of one of those and hurtle towards the ground at 125 miles per hour!”  From Slack to the Skies ...

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Each post in the Siemens HMI Toolbox series highlights a native HMI object in the Siemens WinCC Comfort, Advanced, or Professional environments. It is our goal to help users become more familiar with HMI development by sharing some of our best practices and the useful tools we have learned. This post focuses on the PDF view control object. Overview: The PDF view object allows you to display PDF documents in your HMI runtime application. This can be an incredibly powerful tool in applica...

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Who doesn't love a little friendly competition with coworkers? DMCers have participated in a variety of sports leagues over the years, from beach volleyball in Chicago to kickball in NYC. There's no shortage of opportunities for us to bond outside of the office, but nothing compares to that feeling of teaming up for something other than that engineering project you're making things happen on.  Chicago Competition DMC Chicago's colleagues have kept busy teaming up ...

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