Don’t you hate it when your coworker inadvertently wires up a 24V PLC to wall power and lets out the magic smoke? Just such a mishap happened in our lab a while back and the broken PLC was sitting around in the junk bin for a while. Figuri...
Meet HR Coordinator Heather Talbert! Heather is based in the DMC Chicago office as a member of the Internal Operations team. She helps recruit top talent for DMC and implement internal improvement initiatives, like DMC Cares. ...
Flashing an ECU can be a time-intensive process, so it’s no wonder that automotive OEMs are looking for ways to speed up production. Luckily, Vector has released a set of C/C# API commands called vFlashStation. This library has the capabilit...
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...
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...
Similar parts in production can be processed with small changes by a machine using part data to define variables for each part or set of parts. For example, a machine may need to produce 30 widgets at 90º angle, 20 mm length then ...
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...
DMC has an all company meeting every month where everyone in our regional offices and our Chicago office gets together via video conferencing or in person to share knowledge, introduce new employees to the company, celebrate anniversaries, and t...
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 ...
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...