PLC Passwords on the GS4 Variable Frequency Drive from AutomationDirect

There are two passwords associated with the PLC in the GS4 Variable Frequency Drive. One protects the project on your computer’s hard drive, the other one protects the data in the drive’s PLC. To protect your project ladder code, go to Options, Program Setting, Project Password Setting. I’ll enter a password of 1, 2, 3, 4 - it has to be exactly 4 characters and can be any printable character on the ascii chart. Any of these which includes the space character. Enter it again to confirm. You can also limit the number of tries. It says we’re done. Now it’s asking for a password if we want to get back to the password change dialog. We don’t want to do that, so hit cancel. If I save this password protected project … and close the project … Then try to re-open it again … you can see it loaded the ladder code by the number of steps down here – but it won’t let you edit ladder diagram. If we open the project window and try to open the ladder diagram by double clicking here … it asks for the password. Type it in and now we can edit our ladder code. This file is currently password protected, so if we now try to go change the password, we have to enter the current password to get access. BEWARE – you are now starting over. If you hit CANCEL right now, you just told GSLOGIC you don’t want a password. Let’s try that. Save it. Close the entire project. Bring it up and sure enough we don’t need a password. So, cancelling out of this dialog clears the password if you save the project. If you don’t save the project, then nothing gets saved, including the password. It’s really important to understand that. Ok, that was how to protect your project on your hard drive. Right now anyone can go read a project from the PLC by pressing this button. What if we want to password protect that? Easy. Just go to Communication, System Security, PLC Password Setting. Same thing – right? Enter a password, confirm it, and hit OK. We don’t want to go back to the password dialog box, so hit cancel. And that’s it – the PLC is now password protected. If we try to download the project we get a password challenge screen. Enter the password and we get the requested ladder code from the drive. This also applies to writing the program. If a password has been set in the PLC, you will have to enter it to over-write the PLC code. And just like before, if we want to change the password, we have to know what it was, and if we cancel out of the password dialog, it clears the password in the PLC and we can read the ladder logic from the PLC without being challenged. One word of caution. Both the project on your hard drive and the PLC passwords are protecting YOUR intellectual property. If you forget your password, you won’t be able to access the ladder code on your hard drive and the only way to write a new program to the PLC is to either re-format the PLC to factory default here – you have to be connected to the drive to do that or course - or via the Keypad. Scroll down to PLC to disable it – you can’t reset an active PLC, of course! – then go to parameter 9.08 to reset the PLC. Don’t forget to put the PLC back into Run or Stop mode so GSLOGIC can talk to it. And please don’t call AutomationDirect’s support team to reset your password – they won’t be able to help you. So PLEASE be REALLY careful when using password protection. Click here to learn more about GS4 Variable Frequency Drives. Click here to learn about AutomationDirect’s free support options and click here to subscribe to AutomationDirect’s YouTube channel so you will be notified when we post new videos.