DMC’s team was proud to win first place at the Ignition Community Conference (ICC) 2024 Build-a-thon in Folsom, CA. After finishing first in a field of 24 Premier Integrators in a preliminary round, we faced BIJC Ltd in the final round of the competition to build a solution in two short days.
Congratulations to our team members Brandon Tanner, Sheila Kennedy-Moore, and Nicoli Liedtke for representing DMC and bringing home the win!
The Competition
DMC and BIJC Ltd competed live on stage in an industrial automation challenge for the ICC Build-a-thon’s grand finale. To challenge our Ignition programming skills, we had two days to program an Ignition application to control a convenience store. The store had a car wash, gas pump, and food market.
Opto 22 provided the PLCs and a miniature convenience store that we could control. The goal provided by Inductive Automation was to make it easy to expand our brand of convenience stores and take over the world with our stores. We decided to include a Minion theme in our project, saying that we were hired by Gru to take over the world with our convenience stores. Our tagline was, “This is a first for DMC, being hired by a villain.”
To accomplish this goal, DMC made a high-level map screen displaying the location and the status of each store. Users could click on a store location on the screen to see more details. In order to verify that each store was profitable for our business expansion, we used simulation logic to simulate transactions. We also tracked the store’s transactions and profitability with custom dashboards. Our solution streamlined configuring new stores by prompting the user to fill out its name and select the location on a map once the project detected new MQTT tags.
One highlight of our solution was our slick user interface (UI). We implemented custom CSS in our project to give the UI a polished look. This is a complex aspect of Ignition that not everyone has experience with, and we spent extra time on the UI to make our project stand out.
Other fun aspects of the project included creating a car wash button with an animated car and bubbles. We also created a custom SVG to control the store’s lights. Every time the car wash ran, we brought out bubble guns.
Each member of DMC’s team presented on part of the project. Sheila handled the introduction and the project overview. Nicoli did the technical project review and Brandon took on the project curveball which was adding a new store to the application. The audience voted on the winner, and we were proud to take home the honors and wear the orange winner’s blazers!
If you are interested in digging into the code that we made during the Build-a-Thon, we’ve uploaded our project to the Ignition Exchange here.
Ignition Community Conference
The Ignition Community Conference's mission is to see new technology, share ideas, and find inspiration. In addition to competing in the Build-a-Thon, DMC led a presentation on Optimizing Load Time in Ignition Perspective by Elizabeth Reed and Casimir Smith.
DMC and Ignition
DMC is an Ignition Premier Integrator. We are Ignition 8.1 Gold certified, illustrating our commitment to delivering Ignition expertise. Our partnership allows DMC access to exclusive technical resources which enables us to deliver top-notch customer service to our clients.
Learn more about DMC’s Ignition partnership and contact us for your next project.