GS20(X) GSOFT2 Quick Start Part 1: Parameter Configuration at AutomationDirect

GSoft2 is the quickest and easiest way to setup and configure your GS20 drive. Let’s do an example. Download and install the FREE GSoft2 application from the AutomationDirect website. Plug a USB cable into the PC and the other end into either of the USB port of your GS20 drive. The USB cable will power the display and you can even modify parameters, but you need to apply power to the drive to actually use it, so we’ll apply power to the drive, and wait for it to come up. Bring up the software and click on connect. If you go to the windows device manager on your PC, you’ll see something that looks like this. Looks like my USB port ended up in this com port – yours will probably be different - so I should enter that here – but I’m not going to do that yet. Click on this COM TEST button to verify you have the correct connection. Oops! Something went wrong! Well, we haven’t selected the correct com port yet, right? Let’s do that now and try the test again. Ahh, much better. Things look good, so let’s connect to the drive. That takes a few seconds, so I’ll fast forward the video. Down here we have a green light telling us we are connected. Ignore this protocol stuff – it only applies to non-USB drives. Click on the parameters button and then click READ to fetch all the parameters from the drive. GREEN parameters can be written to while the motor is running, BLUE parameters can only be written to when the motor is NOT running, and BLACK are read only parameters. This line is important – it tells us we are currently looking at the DRIVE parameters not the parameters read from the computer, which drive GSoft2 is working with and a reminder to hit the READ button to update the current drive parameters. If I reach over to the drive and change parameter 00.04 to a 2 and hit READ, give it a few seconds … sure enough we see the new parameter. It’s RED because it is NOT a default value. I love that I can quickly see what is different just by looking for the RED parameters. You can also see what the min and max allowable values are for each parameter. Writes on the other hand happen instantly. For example, let’s change that user display back to a 3 and as soon as I hit return or even just click away from that cell the drive gets updated. And look down here … there is a running log that tells us everything we have done since the last READ from the drive. If I do another read that log gets cleared out. Once you have the parameters the way you want them, you can save them to your hard drive. We want to save the table from the drive to disk. Enter a file name and do it. Now I can open that disk file – which is an excel spreadsheet by the way – and that appears down here. So, these are the parameters from the drive and these are the parameters from the disk file. And look up here – we are currently modifying the FILE parameters, not the DRIVE parameters. It’s really important that you keep an eye on this guy to make sure you are editing the correct set of parameters. Let’s change the user display parameter back to a 2. The drive didn’t change because we are not editing the drive’s parameters. But we can write the file parameters to the drive by clicking WRITE. We can deselect any we don’t want to write, and then hit the WRITE button. When it’s done, we see the write summary page where it tells us everything that was written and any parameters that didn’t get successfully written. So, Save, Open and New are disk file operations, Read and Write are Drive operations. The Rating button is to change the Drive rating type in the File parameter set. For example, if I have a 1HP GS20 configured exactly like I want it, I can download that configuration into a 2HP GS20 by simply clicking this button and changing the drive rating in the file. Finally, this compare button is a great feature. It allows you to do a side by side comparison between parameters read from the drive and the parameters read from the saved disk file. If I Read my current drive parameters … and save those to disk … and then open that same file … then the drive and file parameters should be identical. So, if we do a compare, we get this. It shows us all the drive parameters that are not defaults, all the file parameters which are not defaults and the difference between the two which since we haven’t changed anything is empty. I’ll exit that and go select the drive parameters and change that same guy to a 7. Now if we do a compare, we see there is one difference between the saved file and the drive parameters. We could then write the drive parameters to the drive or save them to disk if we wanted to. This is a virtual keypad. It’s like using the optional GS4 keypad – which we have a separate video on – so you have to make sure the remote and/or local configurations are set to use the RS485 as their source for frequency and operation. The greyed-out buttons aren’t active, but you can run, change direction and stop the drive and change the frequency. You can also JOG the drive by clicking here. You have to hit the STOP to stop jogging. Well, that ought to be enough to get you started with GSOFT2. But, there are some other really cool features built into this software like the ability to view signals in real time and do firmware updates. We’ll cover those in other videos. One final note. At the time I am doing this video, GSoft2 only works with the GS20 and GS4 drives. You’ll still need the original GSoft application to configure GS1, GS2 and GS3 drives. The good news is they are both free downloads at the AutomationDirect website. Click here to all of the GS20 video tutorials. 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