IronHorse GSD8 DC Drive Family Overview - from AutomationDirect

AutomationDirect has a variety of Digital DC Drives but sorting through the datasheets to figure out which one you need is tedious. So here is a concise feature matrix to help you decide which one is best for your application. There are 5-amp and 10-amp drives. And the only real differences are: this 5-amp drives doesn’t support option cards, has reduced alarm capabilities, and supports a lower sensor pulse rate. Other than that, you just choose what form factor you want: eighth DIN, quarter DIN or wall mount, and if you want the option cards pre-installed or not. Having those options cards pre-installed saves you the trouble of installing them yourself and the bundle costs a little less. By the way, you CAN install both option cards in one drive. All these drives automatically accept the full input power range without jumpers. They all support both 90 and 180 Volts DC output. They are all NEMA 4X rated. They all have closed loop control. They all support alarming. And they all support all three modes of operation. Notice that this guy isn’t really a drive. He’s called a Digital Potentiometer, but really, he’s identical to these drives, except instead of controlling a motor directly, he controls an off-board drive which controls the motor, which is really cool because it means you can turn an old analog open loop drive that you have very little control over, into a closed loop system so you can accurately control your DC motor! And, that also means you can operate this guy as either closed loop or open loop! The analog option card has a 4-20 milliamp input, a 4-2 milliamp output, a digital input and a relay output which you would typically use for alarm reporting. And while this is primarily a serial communications card, it also has a versatile analog input, a digital input and a frequency generator output. We have a bunch of tutorial videos that walk you step-by-step through how to use this family of drives, so click here to see all of the GSD8 Digital DC Drive tutorial videos in this series. Click here to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you will be notified when we publish new videos and click here to learn about AutomationDirect’s free award-winning tech support options!