In Part 1 we wired everything up like this and ended up with
a test station that looked like this. Let’s apply power and see what happens.
Uh-oh … we got an alarm code of 13. The product insert that comes with the drive has this little
table of the most common error codes. Looks like we have a Motor Override condition. That’s
basically, a simple ESTOP that shuts the motor down without all the extra stuff you would find
in a proper safety circuit. I have that switch labeled ESTOP even though it isn’t a true ESTOP
just because ESTOP is easier to get on a small label than Motor Override. And sure enough,
the Motor Override or simple ESTOP switch is active. I’ll undo that, and the alarm goes away.
The buttons to control the drive are under this little cover. I know these buttons are hard to
see in the video, so I’ll leave this graphic I got from the product insert up for reference.
The display basically has two modes – you can either monitor and manipulate stuff,
or if I hit the mode key, you can configure the drives parameters. You know you’re in parameter
mode because you will always see a P here and this dot that separates the parameter group
from the three-digit parameter number. I’ve been messing with this system,
so let’s do a Factory Reset so you know exactly where I am starting from.
Use the left arrow to go to parameter group 2, and the up-down arrows to select parameter 8. Hit S to
select that parameter and use the up-down arrow keys to change this parameter to a 10. Hit S to
select that and the display says busy, then done. You should always power cycle the drive after a
factory reset to ensure everything gets updated. In the previous video, we hardwired the over travel
limits to not generate alarms. If I pull one of those wires to simulate opening the switch,
sure enough, I get an alarm, which the product insert tells me is an overtravel limit alarm.
I’ll put that back to get rid of the alarm. We could have skipped that bypass wiring
and simply disabled the over travel limits via parameters.
The product insert has a list of all the input pins and their default function.
Looks like overtravel limits are inputs 6 – which defaults to the clockwise over travel
limit - and 7 which defaults to the counterclockwise overtravel limit. I’ll hit the
M key to get into Parameter Entry mode, and use the left arrow to go to group 2 and the up-down
arrows to go to parameter 15 - which controls input 6’s function - and hit S to select that.
We see its default is zero 22. This zero tells us it operates as a normally closed switch
which makes sense, because that will generate an alarm if the wire gets cut. I’ll change that to
normally open and when I hit S to accept it, sure enough, I get an over-travel limit alarm.
If I cut or in this case pull the wire the alarm goes away. Put the wire back and the
alarm returns. To disable that alarm input I just set it to a zero and hit S to accept it.
Now I get no alarm regardless of wiring. Perfect.
Now I can just up arrow to parameter 16 which controls input 7 – the other limit - and hit S
to select that. I’ll disable it by setting it to a 0 and hitting S. The normally open normally closed
digit doesn’t matter if the input is disabled. Great, we now know how to configure and disable
the digital inputs and navigate the display. Let’s see if the servo motor's encoder is working.
I’ll hit the mode key to get out of parameter mode. If I hit the up or down arrow keys I can
scroll through all the things I can do. We’ll cover those in the display monitoring video, for
now we just want to monitor the encoder feedback which is this FB for feedback. PUU stands for Pulse
User Units – which reminds us that we are not viewing the raw pulses from the servo’s encoder.
Instead we are monitoring the pulses modified by the electronic gear ratio in parameters 1.044
and 1.045. We’ll learn how to use electronic gearing in the various operating mode videos.
That message stays up for about a second – I stopped the video so you could see it
longer - then the display shows the data. If I reach over and rotate the motor shaft,
sure enough, we see the pulse count change. This encoder has over 16 million pulses per
revolution but the default electronic gearing scales that to 100,000 pulses per revolution.
So if I rotate this 1 revolution, yep we see it rolls over at 100,000. If I press the left
arrow key you can see the upper word so if I do another rotation we see that increment.
If I rotate it the other way two rotations back to zero and then keep going we get these weird dots everywhere.
Those tell us this is a negative number. If I go one full rotation in that direction, then
I roll over at a negative 100,000 pulses. Perfect. We can also monitor the digital inputs. We do that
by setting parameter group zero, parameter 2 to a 39. So I’ll hit the M key to get back to parameter
mode and hit the left arrow to get to group zero, and the up-down arrows to get to parameter 2.
Select that, change it to a 39 and select that. It tells us we are going into display mode and the
display now shows us the digital inputs. If I pull the wire from digital input 6 to simulate an over
travel alarm, sure enough, we see the corresponding bit go active. This is a hexadecimal display
so that 2 in the second digit location tells us the 6th digital input is active.
Remember we disabled that input. Which is cool
because that means you can test your digital inputs even if the inputs function is disabled!
If I toggle the alarm reset switch – yep – we see it’s working too.
But, if I toggle the ESTOP we don’t see the status bit, instead, we see
the error condition. That’s important, error conditions always have a higher priority. But,
while we can’t see the individual bit change, we know it worked because we got the error message!
So how cool is that – you can monitor all of your digital inputs any time you want
right here on the display! That makes checking out your digital inputs super easy.
Can we test the digital outputs? Sure! You can force any digital output active from the display.
In parameter group 2, parameter 8, select that and change it to 406. We could scroll to that, but
that would take a while so instead I’ll just left arrow to each character and set it one at a time.
Select that - we see the digital output force message for a second,
then it’s ready to accept our commands. So, we go to parameter group 4 parameter
006 and enter a hex value for the outputs. I wired digital output 1 to this beacon like this.
So, if I enter a 1 and select that, sure enough the beacon turns on telling us output 6 is active.
If I change that back to zero, and select that, the light turns off.
Perfect. Remember, this is a hex value so a 2 turns on output 2, a 4 turns on output 3,
an 8 turns on output 4 and an F turns on all four. And zero turns its four outputs off.
This forcing of the digital outputs will stay active until you set parameter group 2 parameter
8 to a 400, which I’ll do here, or power cycle the drive. Don’t forget to do one of these, otherwise
later you are going to wonder why none of your outputs are responding to normal operations.
Ok, it’s time to test the motor. Let’s power down the drive just to make absolutely sure
there is no power going to the motor and finally connect the motor to the drive. I added a plastic
pulley just to make it easier for you to see the shaft turning. You will want to make sure there
is nothing connected to the motor shaft until you are confident it is working the way you expect.
Ok, I’ll apply power to the drive and we see our sure servo startup message.
One of my favorite things about the Sure Servo system is you can Jog the motor from the display –
you don’t have to connect any switches or other hardware so it’s super easy to test your motor.
Right now, I can freely spin the motor because it is not being powered. I’ll flip this switch to
enable the drive's output and now the drive won’t let me rotate the shaft and is doing everything
it can to maintain the current position. To jog the motor, just go to parameter 4.005 and
set the jog speed. Let’s use this default of 20 RPM. The display tells us we are now in JOG mode.
To jog forward I hit the up arrow … and jog the other way we just pressed the down arrow button.
I’ll press M to exit that, S to select the jog speed again, and this time let’s go to 60 RPM
which is 1 revolution per second. Select that, we see we are in JOG mode, so I’ll play with the up
and down arrows to jog the motor. Perfect. That’s it – we’re done! Let’s re-cap:
We wired everything up in part 1. Then in this video we reset to factory default,
learned about alarm codes and that the most common ones are in the product insert, We learned how
to assign functions to digital inputs, how to disable inputs and how to change them between
normally open and normally closed. We verified the encoder feedback pulses, that negative numbers are
displayed with the extra dots, learned that the encoder has over 16 million pulses per revolution
but the default electronic gearing scales that to 100,000 pulses per revolution.
We learned how to monitor the digital inputs, force the digital outputs, and jog the motor.
How did I know how to do all of this? I didn’t. I literally just walked you through the quick start
section of the product insert. So, if you have any questions, refer to that first, which again,
you can always download for free from the AutomationDirect.com website. It’s an awesome
resource that you will want to keep handy. So what’s next? Well,
that depends on what you want to do. The Pulse Train video is for anyone that wants to
control a CNC type of machine that expects pulses to control the motor. The Position Register video
is for applications where the drive simply tells the motor to go to one position,
then another position like in a factory where you need to repeat the same exact motion over and over
again. The Torque Mode video shows you how to set up the drive to handle situations where you need
to maintain constant tension – like when you have a roll of paper, or thin film or fabric that if
pulled too slow messes up the process but too fast rips the material. And finally, the Speed mode
is for those time when you need to accurately maintain the speed of something. This is ideal
for controlling the spindle speed of a CNC machine or the speed of a conveyor. Stuff like that.
Be sure to check out all this drive has to offer. Easy homing,
Quadrature Encoder following, Safe Torque Off, Inertia Estimating, Auto-tuning, PID,
Capture and Compare, Absolute Positioning, Electronic Camming, and the Free configuration
software, just to name a few. And of course, we have videos showing you how to do many of those.
Meanwhile … Click here to learn more about the
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