Along with two other employees at DISTek, I received the privilege to be a judge at the Iowa regional FIRST Robotics Competition. The theme this year was steampunk and teams needed to work cooperatively to power a Victorian era steam powered airship.
In the early 1990s, the world was in a state of change. Germany was reunified in 1990, the dissolution of the Soviet Union happened in 1991, Yugoslavia was breaking apart in 1992, while here in the USA another presidential election cycle was brewing. It was into this world that DISTek was born on April 1, 1992. Company founder, Matt Dickinson, brought his experience in electronics for the agricultural, aerospace, and factory automation industries and setup DISTek as a contract provider of embedded electronics engineering services for off-highway equipment.
Have you ever wished you were a Jedi with the power of the force such that with the wave of your hand, droids would fall backward? I created a simple LEGO® MINDSTORMS® robot to provide that power to anyone. This LEGO robot with the program I call “The Force” has been a hit among children at STEM fairs.
Once again, another ISOBUS Plugfest is upon us. On May 9th, dozens of Ag electronics engineers from around the globe will descend upon the Embassy Suites in Lincoln, NE, for three days of testing. ISOBUS exists to provide a standardized method of communicating between Ag vehicles and Ag implements, and Plugfest exists to do a quick spot-check on different types of equipment in one location. I strongly recommend attending a Plugfest for anyone involved in engineering networked electronics for heavy equipment, especially if that equipment supports third-party additions.
The 2017 AMC Engineering Conference is just around the corner, but there’s plenty of time to make plans to attend. This year’s event will once again be held in downtown Waterloo, Iowa at the Five Sullivan Brothers Convention Center starting on Tuesday, April 25th through Thursday, April 27th. The 31st annual AMC Engineering Conference provides a forum for agricultural & off-highway engineers to come together to celebrate and grow engineering skills in the Midwest.
Recently, DISTek spent a week in Louisville, KY to attend a couple of industry shows. First up was the AETC conference where we sponsored a couple students to attend the conference, had a supplier display table, and also participated in a presentation on updates in the ISOBUS world.
Functional programming has become popular recently, and many object oriented languages (C#, Scala, Java) have begun including functional concepts as part of the language. Here we’ll go over a few functional ideas in C#.
It’s been a crazy couple of weeks around the office. We’re moving what feels like a thousand miles a minute as we put the final touches on our presentation for CONEXPO-CON/AGG 2017. Yes, you read that right, the DISTek crew is headed to Las Vegas next week for THE international construction industry show. This year’s show is running March 7 – 11 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
DISTek will be taking over Louisville, Kentucky next week. We have plans to host a supplier technology display at the Agricultural Equipment Technology Conference (AETC) hosted by ASABE (American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers). The AETC is a three day event held at the Seelbach Hilton that kicks off on Monday, February 13th and concludes on Wednesday, February 15th. The AETC provides a forum for engineering professionals working for, or with, equipment manufacturers and those developing new standards the opportunity to come together to celebrate and grow engineering skills.
A customer has been receiving field failures and the root cause has been difficult to determine. They have ideas of what may be causing these failures and need a test system that can simulate the various conditions and monitor the Device Under Test (DUT) to assist in determining the root cause. The customer turned to DISTek to provide a bench-top setup that will control the DUT and measure multiple in-circuit test points for events that may be damaging field effect transistors (FET) along with recording FET case temperatures. Custom events have been defined by the customer and will trigger the system to capture pre and post-trigger data. The test system should also provide various loads to the output of the DUT.
Early last year, I wrote in this space about my new title – “employee owner,” after DISTek founder Matt Dickinson decided to share a part of his company with his employees by forming an ESOP – an Employee Stock Ownership Plan.
I noted back then that my immediate responsibilities wouldn’t change, and from the standpoint of my day-to-day tasks, they really haven’t.
Here at DISTek we just competed our 24th full calendar year as a company, which means our 25th anniversary happens in 2017. We are excited to think about our future as we pass this milestone, but it is also healthy to step back and review what we did in 2016. We took some bumps and bruises along the way – as did many in the industries we serve – but we also had some exciting successes.
