Servo Quick Start Part 1 - LS Electric L7C & L7P Servo System at AutomationDirect

Here are all the wiring connections you’ll need for the default out-of-the-box system. I also included the part numbers of the devices I’m using in this demo. Let’s take it one step at a time. Connect your single-phase 230-volt supply to terminals L1, L2, and Chassis Ground. To add our motor, we need to connect the encoder cable. It’s keyed to the connector, so you can’t mess up. Just insert it and tighten the screws. Don’t leave the screws loose – there’s too much riding on getting the correct and accurate signals back to the drive. On the drive end, just plug the cable in here. The motor’s power cable is also keyed to the motor. Insert it and tighten the screws. On the drive end, the wires go here. Just match the wire labels with the terminal labels. The user manual recommends NOT connecting the motor power cable until you have everything set up and working first. That way you don’t create a safety hazard while you're getting things set up. We aren’t connected to a machine in this demo, so I went ahead and connected the motor power. We don’t have a braking motor here, but if we did, it would be another keyed connector on the motor, and the brake wires would go to a digital output on the I/O connector that you configure to control the motor braking, usually through a relay or contactor. Be careful! These are for regen braking – you put a regen resistor across these. They are not for the motor's brake. Be careful you don’t mix those up. I’ll dim that out to remind us we aren’t using it. The little x’s are placeholders where you would put the cable length option you need. The I/O connector on the drive has all the digital, analog, control and communications signals. For our demo we’ll use the convenient terminal block which comes with the required cable. There is also a pigtail cable which comes with heat shrink labels ready for you to use on each wire. I love that. We’re using the terminal block, so we just plug the cable into the I/O slot and the other end into the terminal block. The terminal block comes with a label strip that has all the pin numbers but if you go to the drive’s page at AutomationDirect.com and scroll down, you’ll find this. It’s a file you can download with a printable version of that label in both PDF and Excel formats, so you can modify as you see fit. Print it out using this scale and cut out the one you want. I like the one with the pins labeled. Fold it in half along the red line, pull the old one out, and slide the new one in. I can now see what each pin is. Double-check the orientation of the label strip – it’s easy to insert it upside down. The file with that printable terminal strip also has instructions showing you how to orient it. Keep an eye on that. Our factory default drive expects to see a normally closed ESTOP contact and normally closed reverse and forward limits. So, if we don’t wire those up we'll get alarms. Those get wired to the negative terminal of a 24-volt DC supply and the plus supply goes to pin 50. These are all optically isolated inputs, so all you are really doing on each of these is creating a circuit to drive an LED. For our demo, I just hardwired the limits and connected the ESTOP to a simple single pole ESTOP switch. What you connect there will depend on your risk analysis. That’s it for wiring. What’s next? Hopefully, you have seen the family overview – if not I would encourage you to take a couple minutes and go watch that. And we just did the hardware quick start. So join me in the next video where we’ll quickly spin through the drive configuration just so you can get a feel for the flow, and then we’ll jog the motor just to make sure we wired everything up correctly. After that, you’ll be ready to do something productive with the L7C Servo system. Check out the videos that show you how to auto-tune your servo system, do homing, use it in a pulse and direction system, use it with Modbus RTU, etc. We have lots of videos to help you come up to speed quickly. So, be sure to click here to subscribe to the AutomationDirect YouTube channel and hit the little bell icon so you will be notified when more L7C Servo videos become available. You can also click here to learn about AutomationDirect’s free award-winning support options and click here to learn more about the LS Electric L7C Servo System from AutomationDirect.com.