This September, DMC attended the tenth annual Inductive Community Conference (ICC) and was honored to be a finalist in the Build-a-Thon.
The Build-a-Thon was a jam-packed two days of intense programming at the Inductive Automation headquarters. This year's challenge centered around building a solution for automating a mixing and heating system using hardware provided by Opto 22.
DMC received the project objective early Monday morning and had two days to build a complete program for recipe handling, automatic sequencing, and HMI visualization.
For our solution, DMC developed a project using the Ignition perspective module and themed the project around a candy manufacturing process. DMC leveraged Ignition’s mobile-friendly screen functionality to build custom drag-and-drop functionality.
This allowed the user to completely customize the screen to display the data that they wanted to view, and to dynamically change it by dragging their widget of choice onto the screen.
On the backend, DMC used Ignition’s powerful python programming backend to create the automated sequencer that drove the controls for the system. To pair with this, DMC developed a progress bar styled like a pizza tracker to show the user which stage of the sequence they reached.
DMC has an eye for detail, which is why the team developed dynamic, color changing logic that adjusted the color of the tank based on the colored liquid in the tank. The color would update continuously as more liquid was being pumped into the tank to make it as realistic as possible.
After two long days of development, DMC got the opportunity to present our solution to the Ignition community at ICC. The team was decked out in racing suits designed specifically for ICC (check out the fun training video we made here!)
Our competitor Roeslein & Associates put up a good competition, and, at the end of the day, it was a very close race with DMC losing by 3 votes. DMC had a great time competing, and we hope that the Inductive community can use some of the code we created in some of their projects.
Check out some of DMC’s resources from the project that are posted on the Ignition Exchange. Some neat resources include the split container drag and drop, the progress bar, and the full build-a-thon project.
When we weren't ferociously programming, DMC was able to attend various sessions at the conference. Some sessions that were particularly interesting were "Using Ignition with Machine Learning Libraries," which detailed a new exchange resource that allows users to create, train, and process machine learning models, "Changes Towards the Digital Transformation – Turn and Face the Strange," which gave an overview of an Ignition-driven data pipeline that brings information all the way from an edge network to the CEO, as well as "Running Ignition in a Container Environment," where the DMC team learned new tips and tricks for leveraging Docker technology with Ignition.
It was a great two days at ICC and DMC is looking forward to next year!