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...
When it comes to capturing time-lapse videos, there are numerous off-the-shelf solutions and libraries out there. For last year’s FedEx Day project, I decided to implement a minimalist solution on a Raspberry Pi using only the default imag...
Creating tags in a Wonderware InTouch HMI project that connect to your Allen-Bradley PLC is quick and easy for small projects. However, on projects with hundreds or thousands of tags, it can become time consuming! To speed up this proces...
Visitors to DMC may notice our ever-changing "Quote Board," documenting the best engineering jokes and employee one-liners of the moment.