Productivity3000 How To: Configure and Use Variable Frequency Drives (VFD's) from AutomationDirect

The Productivity3000 makes configuring and operating the GS Series Variable Frequency Drives so easy. In our little demo here we have our local base which is connected to this Stride Ethernet switch. The Ethernet switch connects to a remote base here and a GS-EDRIVE which is connected to a Variable Frequency Drive, or VFD, using the black RS485 cable that comes with the edrive. We setup the e-drive with a node address of 1 by flipping this little DIP switch right here. Since our Local base and VFD both have an RS485 port, could we connect the two via RS485? We could, but that is the hard way because you would have to do everything manually. In this video we are going to do it the easy way. First we need to configure the Hardware. Start a new project, go on-line with the processor. This dialog is telling me this project is different from what is currently on the controller. Yeah, we know that. We want to use this new project. And now that we are online we can just click on Hardware configuration to the Read the Configuration of our system. Remember, to read the configuration of the system, the controller has to be in STOP mode. I can reach down and flip the switch on the controller, or better yet, I can just come up here and say STOP. Am I sure I want to do that? Yes. Now my Read Configuration button is active and I can click on it. The software fully auto discovers everything that is in our system and brings up a dialog. This dialog says that the base is different than what is in our project ñ thatís fine. This one found a module thatís in a different place ñ thatís fine. This one found another module. Another module. Another module. Another Base. And it found a GS Drive. So now our hardware setup is fully auto-discovered. I love that. I have a local base and a remote base. And here is the GS Drive. Now we just double click on the GS drive to configure it. All of these parameters that are stored in these tables were read directly from that drive. You donít have to enter any of this stuff yourself. To get the system up and running, all we really need to do is specify the motor parameters. Here is the name plate of the motor we are using. So weíll just use that to fill in these blanks. Letís see. It looks like this motor operates at 230 volts. Itís a 1 amp motor, and notice that this is specified in tenth amp increments. So that means we need to put a 10 here. My motor base frequency is 60 Hz, thatís right. And according to the nameplate, this operates at 1725 ñ so weíll make this 1725 also. Thatís it. Thatís all we really need to do to get this going. I do want to check on my ramps though and make sure they are reasonable. Yeah, this acceleration time is 10 seconds and 30 seconds ñ note that it is in tenth second increments. I really want to speed that up for this demo, so letís make it a 1 second ramp and, oh how about a 2 second deceleration. Letís look at one more thing. Over here under the Digital Tab, notice that the system automatically set this up so that the source of operation for the drive is the RS485. Just because we are configuring this drive over the network, doesnít mean you have to operate it over the network. If you donít want to you would select digital keypad, or the external controls. We want to use the network to control this drive for this example so we will leave that alone. Ok, we are good to go. We just setup the motor parameters. We modified our ramps a little, and we double checked that we had the correct control. Letís go ahead and get out of these dialog boxes. Our hardware is now setup. The best part of all of that is those parameters are stored with the project file. That means if you ever have to replace the drive, you just yank the old one, install the new one and turn everything back on. You donít have to worry about reconfiguring the new drive. The Productivity3000 will program the drive for you on each program transfer or when the controller is powered up. There is one caveat though. In order to get the auto configure to work, you need to make sure this one feature is enabled. Go to TOOLS, OPTIONS, PROJECT TRANSFER. Right here where it says transfer GS Drive Configuration on project transfer, make sure that box is checked and it will work exactly as expected. This is great. Now that the hardware is all fully discovered and configured, we just use it. Letís have switch 1 on our input simulator enable the drive and switch 2 jog the motor. Just to make things easy, letís go label those switches in the hardware configuration. Bring up the hardware configuration. My local base. Hereís my input simulator. And Iím going to say I want Switch 1 ñ oh letís call him MOTOR ENABLE. And switch 2, letís call him MOTOR JOG. Great. Now when we reference those we can call them by name. To control this VFD, we could use a Modbus write and a Modbus Read. But the Productivity3000 has dedicated commands for doing GS Drive Writes and Reads. So all we do is grab one of these GS Drive Writes, and drop it onto a rung. So we select the drive we want to control ñ we only have the one at address 1 right now ñ and we tell it how fast we want it to go when the run command is issued. Letís run at 55 Hz. That means we put a 550 here since this is specified in tenth hertz increments. And when we jog it, letís jog it at 10 hz ñ so that would be a 100. There are lots of other flags and parameters we could setup but we donít need those for this demo. There is also a RUN mode parameter table and a STOP mode parameter table. Weíll go into more detail on those in part two of this video. For now just understand that this Auto Run input terminal to this instruction only writes this one parameter to the drive. The Run Command parameter. The Auto Jog, only writes the Jog parameter. The Run Mode Data only sends this run mode table. The Stop Mode Data only sends this Stop Mode Data. And it only does it when the motor is stopped, by the way. Again weíll get into more of that in part two of this video. For now just understand that each terminal only controls itís individual item it doesnít affect the others. Looks like we are good to go here so weíll hit OK. Letís go ahead and enable our motor with the motor enable we defined earlier. And letís go ahead and Jog the motor with the jog we defined earlier. And since we are not using the RUN MODE Data or the STOP MODE data, weíll just use this convenient ìAlways Offî bit to make sure those arenít engaged. Thatís all there is to setting up the GS Drive. Letís save our project Ö and transfer it to the controller. Now we put the controller in RUN mode ñ are we sure we want to do that? Yep. Letís turn on monitoring so we can monitor the status of all of our bits. And now if I reach over and flip switch 1 to ON, sure enough, the Variable Frequency Drive ramps up to 55 hz as expected. And when I release that motor enable, it ramps back down to zero. Likewise, when I enable motor jog, the motor speeds up to 10 hz, and when I release it, it ramps back down to zero. Easy. Well, thatís all there is to configuring and operating a GS Series VFD over the network from a Productivity3000 Controller. In part II we will look a little closer ñ and have a little fun ñ with some of the other options and parameters. Be sure to check out the other videos in this series for more ways to get up and running quickly with this controller. And as always, please send us any comments you may have, we appreciate the feedback. Performance plus Value Ö Thatís Productivity. From AutomationDirect.