Korey Kautzman 
DISTek has been offering engineering services in the Red River Valley for almost a decade now. During that time, we’ve seen our engineering team in Fargo grow from a single individual to a team of ten. We were definitely at capacity at our office up on the North side of Fargo, even having to go so far as putting a desk in the corner of our conference room to accommodate our team.
In April, DISTek sent me to Dusseldorf, Germany where I attended the 3rd International VDI Conference for Connected Off-highway Machines. This 2-day conference was a great opportunity since there were two additional conferences running in parallel. The fine folks at VDI allowed access to any of the three conference events with admission to any single event, so not only did I have access to the speakers and round table discussions at the Connected Off-Highway Machines Conference, but also the Autonomous Trucks Conference and the Smart Farming Conference. Overall, it was a great experience that provided a glimpse into what the future holds for autonomous machinery.
Rookie no more, I’m two days into my first ISOBUS AEF Plugfest experience. It’s close to what I expected but as with all things I made some assumptions that turned out to be incorrect. No description or story of an event can fully prepare you for something, and Plugfest is no exception. That’s not to say what I’m about to share of my experience thus far won’t be of any help to future would-be attendees, so keep reading.
Upon arrival in San Jose I headed down to baggage claim to retrieve my suitcase that I was forced to check due to just being on a completely full plane. I then headed outside and was struck with what felt like a heat wave after being in the Midwest for one of our coldest winters. Granted it was only around 60°F, but when I left North Dakota it was around 35°F.
Attending EE Live! in San Jose allowed me to attend numerous sessions and learn about many different technologies and ideas…
EELive!, formerly known as DESIGN West, is an annual week-long engineering industry event which includes the embedded systems conference, training sessions, boot camps, postmortems, and a large expo featuring exhibits from vendors across the industry.
