GS20(X) Variable Frequency Drive Tutorial Quick Start from AutomationDirect

Let’s do a bare minimum configuration of this drive to get this motor turning just so you can get a feel for how to configure the GS20 series of drives. In a real application, you would wire the drive like this to maximize protection, minimize EMI, etc. But for our quick little demo we're going to skip all of this and just wire the drive directly to a single-phase 220-volt supply and the motor directly to the drive. If you are using a 120-volt drive, it would look exactly the same except this would be 120-volt line and neutral. Before we apply power, we need to remove the RFI jumper because we are using a single-phase power supply which is an unbalanced supply. The built-in RFI filter is only for balanced symmetrical power supply systems. It’s this jumper which you release with a screw down here and then pull out on the smaller drives. On the NEMA 4X drives it’s a metal plate you rotate out of the way. If you leave the jumper in you run the risk of destroying the RFI circuitry. The drive will probably still run, but you might notice a little burning smell. The user manual has a whole section that explains when to use the RFI jumper. If in doubt, just leave it out. One final note before we get started. If the drive has been sitting for a while – more than a year or so - or if you don’t know how long it has been sitting, then you should re-charge or “reform” the drives electrolytic capacitors. Just apply power to the drive with no motor connected for 2 hours. This video shows you how to do that and more importantly explains why it is so important. Can you run the drive without reforming the capacitors? Sure, but it will shorten the drive's useful life and potentially damage some of the internal components depending on how long the drive has been sitting around. So just do it. It’s worth taking the time. Ok, we are wired up, we’ve removed the RFI jumper and have taken care of our capacitors, let’s get this motor spinning. The GS20 drives have tons of features, but that means they also have hundreds of parameters. The good news is you only need a couple to get a motor spinning. And even better news is the parameters are grouped into categories, which means to navigate the drive parameters, it’s a two-step process: first, you select the group and then you select the parameter. That makes it a lot quicker to get to the parameter you want. I’m not a big fan of drives that make you scroll through hundreds of parameters just to get to the one you need. Here we go. Let’s set group zero, parameter 2 to a 10 to reset the drive to 60 Hz factory default so you know exactly where we're starting from. Here’s how you do that: Press the menu key to get to the H display – which is the actual drive output frequency. Press enter to go to the group selection. Scroll to the parameter group you want, we want group zero. Hit enter and scroll to the parameter you want: 02. Press enter to edit that parameter, and scroll to a 10 and hit enter to accept that. Great, now all of my drive parameters are reset to factory default for 60 Hz operation and we are back at the top level of the menu. For this demo, let’s control RUN/STOP from the keypad and the motor speed via this knob on the display. All we have to do is enter our motor parameters and tell the drive to use the knob for frequency control. And the only reason I am changing the ramps is so we don’t waste video time waiting for the motor to ramp up or down. I’ll hit the menu to go to the H display. Up arrow to parameter group 1. Hit enter and select parameter 12. Hit enter and change the ramp time to 2 seconds. I’ll be speeding up the video for stuff like this so you don’t have to wait while I scroll. Enter to accept. Go to parameter 13 and hit enter and change the decel ramp to 2 seconds. Enter to accept. I’ll hit the menu key to go back up to the group level and select group 5 so we can modify our motor parameters. Parameter 1 is the motor's full load rated current which I see on the motor nameplate is 3.2 amps. Enter to accept. Go to parameter 2. This is a one-horse power motor which by definition is .75 KW. Hit enter to accept that. Go to parameter 3 and we see the default rpm is 1710 rpm. I’ll change that to the 1725 shown on the motor nameplate. Finally, we need to tell the drive to use the knob for frequency control, so I’ll hit menu to back up to group selection, change to group 0, enter, parameter 20, enter, and change that to a 7. Enter to accept. I’ll hit the menu key a few times to get the frequency display back and then hit run. Sure enough, if I play with the knob I can control the speed of the motor. Not bad at all – we just modified a couple motor parameters and told the drive to use the knob for frequency control. Easy. Let’s do one more thing – let’s display the motor speed in rpm. Go to the H menu, enter, select parameter group 0, hit enter, select parameter 4, hit enter and change the user display to rpm by entering a 7. Enter to accept. I’ll hit the menu a few times to get back to the top frequency display and hit run. F is the frequency we set the output to. Hit the menu once and we see the actual output frequency in Hertz. Press menu again and we see the user display which we set to rpm. The “R” right here reminds us we are looking at rpm. I’ll rotate the knob and sure enough we can go to 1800 rpm. Hit menu again to see the drive's output current in amps. Press the menu key again and we see we are running in the forward direction which is also indicated by this LED. If I hit the up or down arrow, the drive ramps down to zero, reverses direction and ramps back up again. Hit the menu again and you can control the PLC – that’s covered in the PLC video. Let’s press menu a few times to get back to rpm. The GS20 family of drives have an amazing feature set you would normally expect to see only in more expensive drives. The good news is we have a huge step-by-step video tutorial library for this drive that will help you get up and running quickly with those features. We are always creating new videos so click here to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you will be notified when we publish those videos. Click here to see the videos in the current playlists for this GS20 Drive Family and click here to learn about AutomationDirect’s free award winning support options.