SureServo2 Pro Configuration Software Quick Start from AutomationDirect

One of the most amazing features of the SureServo2 system is the free SureServo2 Pro configuration software. You can download it right now at automationdirect.com. Just search for SureServo2 Pro. Before starting the software, know that you have two options for powering the drive electronics. You can power the drive normally via line voltage OR you can power just the control electronics via USB. Which is really cool, because that means you can fully configure the drive before installing it with nothing more than a USB cable. For this video, I’m using the normal line supply to power the drive and I’m using the USB isolator that comes with the USB cable. The USB isolator cuts the power lines and optically isolates the signal lines from the drive. That prevents the USB cable from powering the electronics, but it also ensures that I don’t get any interference between the drive and the PC. Can you use the line voltage and a non-isolated USB cable at the same time? Sure – it won’t hurt anything. You just have to remember to unplug the USB cable when you do a power cycle. Ok, let’s start the SureServo2 Pro software. It asks if we want to connect to a drive. And because I had the drive powered before I started the software, it automatically found the correct USB port. If you forgot to turn the drive on before starting the software, then go ahead and turn the drive on and hit this search button – it will find the correct USB port for you. You can also go directly to the device manager to view the available USB ports. You can create a configuration off-line and then load it into a drive later. Let’s add this drive. I’ll re-arrange the screen, so we can see everything … And we see we are online with the drive. If you ever lose the connection with the drive, I’ll power cycle the drive for example, just acknowledge the messaging telling you the connection was lost and then click on this guy to instantly reconnect. The first thing you get is this drive information screen. Hit the Read button and we see what hardware we are connected to. Looks like we are using this drive with this firmware version, this motor and we are using Windows 10 to talk to it. This gives me confidence that all the components of my system are present and accounted for. The next window is all the parameters associated with the drive. They are red because we haven’t retrieved the parameters from the drive yet. So, I’ll hit this Read Parameters button to get the parameters from the drive and load them into this workspace. That also updates any default values that are hardware-specific. And we get a note that the read was successful. The black numbers tell us everything is current and up to date. We are looking at parameter group zero. The other groups can be seen by clicking on these guys, or over here on these guys. And we also see the drive and motor we are working with here. These columns tell you at a glance which parameters are read-only, can be set only when the servo motor is not enabled, are only valid after a power cycle, if the parameter won’t survive a power cycle, and if it is not updated when doing a batch download. The read-only parameters are also greyed out here. And of course, you can see the current value, units if any, min and max values, and a brief description of each parameter. Let’s go to parameter group 2, parameter 15 – which is the digital input 6 configuration. If I know the value I need, I could just type it here. But look at this. If I double click it brings up a parameter setting helper dialog. Here’s the parameter information including the size of the parameter and the parameter value. You can type in whatever value you want but look at this. Instead of typing the number, I can just select the parameter function in this drop-down! I don’t have to look it up or remember what number does what. And I can set the kind of contact it is without having to remember which is which. All of which means you no longer have to keep going back to the manual to figure out which bit does what in every parameter – it’s all spelled out right here for you and accessed via simple drop-down menus. Very cool. If you hit OK, it will enter the parameter into the workspace – not the drive - or you can immediately write the parameter to the drive by hitting this guy. I’m going to change this limit switch to be a normally open switch and sure enough as soon as I write that to the drive, I get an over-travel limit alarm. If you click on that alarm – or you can also click on this guy – you get a dialog where you can see what the current alarm is, possible causes, corrective actions, and how to clear it. Everything you could want to know without having to break open the manual. You can even see a history of the alarms and my favorite – an alarm lookup tool. What is alarm 1? Overcurrent. How about alarm 23? An overload alarm. Again, no need for the manual – it’s all right here. Let’s change this back to a normally closed switch. And since we know we just need to change this 1 to a zero, I’ll just enter that directly here. This is a key point. If I click away, the value is entered into the workspace but not the drive. This little asterisk reminds us the parameter hasn’t been written yet. You might want to make several parameter changes and then write them all to the drive at the same time using this write parameters button. If instead of clicking away, I edit the parameter and then hit the return key, it writes the parameter to the drive immediately – and we see the alarm went away. Again – clicking away from a cell enters the parameter into the workspace, hitting return actually sends it to the drive. That’s a little subtly that you’ll trip over if you aren’t paying attention. The compare button allows you to compare the current workspace parameters with the drive's defaults, the drive's current values, the workspace’s defaults or a parameter file from disk. That’s a really powerful tool. The convert button allows you to convert a set of parameters to be compatible with whichever firmware version you are using. Which means you can force any parameter set to work with your drive. Very cool. You can save the parameters to a CSV file, password protect your parameters and even create your own custom parameter group. You just create a new group, and then select the parameter you want and click on this guy to copy it to the new group. You now have your own custom parameter group you can access here or here. I love that because I can gather all the parameters I need for a project in one place. You can access this parameter editor at any time by clicking here or here. This parameter editor is great if you know which parameters you need to change. If you don’t know which parameters you need to change, then this parameter wizard will become your best friend. Each of these, groups all the relevant parameters together in a nice clean easy to consume format. For example, suppose we want to change the mode the drive operates in. Just click on that guy and we see a graphical representation of everything we can control relative to the mode changes. This block diagram changes as we select the different modes. And if you want to tweak any of the parameters in any of these blocks, just click on that block. And again, you get a graphical representation of each parameter and how they all play together. It’s like having an interactive user manual at your fingertips at all times. And in any of these dialogs, you can read or write parameters or save that for later and do a single bulk write using this guy. As you can see, you can get really deep down into this stuff. Which brings up another good point … you can selectively write parameters where ever you are. For example, if I select this block of parameters, then only those parameters will get written if I click on this Write Selected parameters button. There are general settings where you can change the rotation direction and braking options. You can configure your pulse options – if you are using pulse mode of course. You can configure the gear ratio. With this drive you can have up to 4 preset gear ratios which you select using two digital inputs. I love this – it shows me how the digital inputs are currently assigned so I don’t accidentally reuse one. This says that for every 16 million pulses which are the actual resolution of one rotation of the motor – the drive will only require 100,000 pulses to get one revolution, which is a ratio of this. You can set the software overtravel limits and torque limits because we are in speed mode. If we were in torque mode this would be a speed limits tab, of course. Configure your analog I/O. This covers analog inputs – which depends on the mode you are using it in – and analog outputs you can use to monitor any of these guys. You get the idea. Each of these gathers all the related parameters for that topic and presents them in an easy to visualize format that shows you how all the parameters are all related which makes it a lot easier for you to set things up. We’ll cover the Scope in another video – it’s an amazing tool that lets you view what’s going on in real-time You can view and control digital I/Os and even jog the motor. We’ve already seen the alarm dialog. This status monitoring shows you what all the various drive displays show in real-time. So I could bring up each individual one on the drive's display or I can just see all of them right here! You can create your own electronic datasheet for your drive's configuration and then import that into your PLC for quick communications setup. We do an example of that in the Ethernet IP videos. The tuning abilities of this drive are amazing. Check out the dedicated videos on Auto Tune and the Inertia Estimator to learn more about those. And finally Motion Control. There are separate videos walking through these, just know it the same thing. Click on what you want to do and everything you need is presented in a nice clean easy to understand format. Notice that some of the more common operations are located up here for quick access. Well that ought to be enough to get you started with the FREE SureSevo2 Pro configuration software. Click here to learn more about the SureServo2 system and find more videos. Click here to subscribe so you will be notified when we publish more videos like this. And click here to learn about AutomationDirect’s free award-winning support options.