WEG CFW100 & CFW300 VFD - Using Remote HMI/Keypad at AutomationDirect

The remote keypad is an awesome option for those times when you need to control the drive but have it located where you can’t reach the drive's front panel. Maybe the drive is buried deep in your machine, in the next room or even a couple buildings away. The remote keypad gives you a quick and easy way to handle that. I’m using the CFW100 version, but this video applies to any WEG drive that uses this kind of remote keypad HMI. It communicates via RS485, so it comes with an RS485 communications module and a serial cable that looks a lot like a mini USB cable. Be careful – this is NOT a USB connection and if you do attach a USB device you risk damaging that device and the drive. I know it looks like a USB connection, but it isn’t so don’t even think about trying it. You’ll see lots of little yellow stickers all over these connectors reminding you of this. I’m going to go to parameter 204 and set it to a 5 to reset the drive to factory default. Remove the yellow “This is not a USB device” warning sticker and connect the provided serial cable that looks like a USB cable into the RS485 module. With the drive off, you just remove the cover and plug the RS485 com module in. Remove the yellow “This is not a USB device” warning label from the remote keypad and plug in the other end of the cable in to it. I do it in this order because it’s usually harder to plug the cable in after you have installed the module. You don’t have to do it in this order, it’s just my preference. Apply power and you can now control the drive from the remote keypad. That’s it. We’re done! You can now do everything you would normally do from the drives keypad using the remote keypad. I’ll go to parameter 204 and change it to a 5 to reset the drive for example. When the drive comes back it automatically recognizes the keypad again. Perfect! There are a couple things you need to know. First, once you have added a remote keypad, the drive's keypad will no longer respond. None of the buttons do anything. If you pull the serial cable out, the drive will give you a fault telling it lost coms with the remote keypad and it will automatically give control back to the drive's keypad where you can reset the fault and go about your business. You should remove power from the drive before you plug the cable back in. The serial cable that looks like a USB cable is 3 meters long. If you need to extend that distance, then connect the keypad like this using the RS485 terminals on the keypad and the RS485 com module. Notice that you will need a 12-volt supply to power the keypad when you are using the RS485 connections. Beware that if your drives are networked over RS485, you can’t use the keypad. It can only be used with one stand-alone drive. It’s important to understand that the remote keypad requires the serial settings on the drive to be at their default settings. We got most of those when we did the factory reset at the beginning of this video, BUT the serial address in parameter 308 does NOT get reset by that command. So, you will have to go in and manually make sure it is set to a 1. That should be enough to get you going. Just remember three things – the provided serial cable is NOT a USB cable, the drive's serial parameters have to be set to the default values and you can use either the remote keypad or the RS485 network, not both. Click here to see all the WEG Variable Frequency Drive Tutorials. Click here to learn about AutomationDirect’s free support options and click here to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you will be notified when we publish new videos.