Every three of four months (or so - depending on everyone's schedule) DMC has an all-day off site company meeting to review progress, plan ahead and to try to discuss topics that will improve things both for us and for our customers. Last week...
Anyone who has ever visited the DMC office probably has made a trip into the friendly 'DMC Annex'. The 'Annex' (which is not really an annex at all, but rather a sub-office in need of a name due to its friendly welcoming attitude) is ...
I discovered an interesting issue with the LabVIEW 8.6 TDMS Write / Close routine I want to share and document for anyone else unlucky enough to encounter it. In defense of LabVIEW, this issue is only encountered if the programmer uses the TDMS Write...
In the beginning, all of the important files at DMC fit onto a single 100MB iomega ZIP disk. Since 1996 we have grown to a 25 person company and gone from 0 servers to 6. We used BackupExec for a couple years but then switched to Dantz Retrospect for...
For at least 9 years (maybe even 10) DMC has been entering a contingency of runners in the annual Bastille Day Race in Chicago's West Loop. This year we get to crown the newest member of our team as the fastest member of our team. Jesse Bat...
Recent press releases by NASA show how the agency is realizing the advantages of using Structured Light for 3D vision. A recent NASA Invention of the Year was a hand-held, battery-operated scanner that they use to create surface maps of shuttle ti...
Recently I've had the opportunity to do some embedded development using the .NET Micro Framework platform. The .NET Micro Framework is a light-weight version of the full .NET framework that can be ported to run on a variety of processors, includi...
I have been using Acroloop 9000 controllers to control a number of machines where one axis is a high-speed rotary motor that drives a mechanical cam-driven process. During operation of the machine, the motor accelerates from a stop to a constant high...
Recently I was using OneNote to compile a lot of test data from Excel and ran into a problem. My data was in a number of different worksheets and when I dragged and dropped the Excel file as a printout into OneNote, I only got 1 of the sheets, not al...
I recently finished a project that checked for gas leaks on a mission critical system. Any leaks needed to be diagnosed and discovered as quickly as possible. Our solution also had to be mobile and easily carted around the facility. To develop a s...