Productivity Series EtherNet/IP with an Allen Bradley Flex Drive at AutomationDirect

the productivity 3000 makes working with the allen bradley variable frequency drives easy for this demo we have an allen bradley powerflex 40 with the ethernet ip adapter all set up and ready to go our goal is to have all the data between the flex drive and the productivity 3000 transferred in the background so our ladder code doesn't have to fool with controlling all those transfer details well that's exactly what the implicit or i o messaging of the ethernet ip protocol does once you set it up it automatically maintains the data transfer for you so your ladder code can just deal with local data here we go here we have an open project the hardware has been auto detected and we're online with the productivity3000 controller to set up the communications with the flex drive we just double click on hardware configuration drag a generic client onto the screen and fill in the blanks you can see we already have some setup for some other devices here we can add as many as we want to now we just fill in the blanks here we give it a name over here we create tags to collect device info and monitor the connection status and over here we provide the ip address of the device we want to talk to the flex drive in this case down here we select the messaging protocol we want to use in our case it's the i o or implicit messaging and we create a tag that we'll use to enable the data transfer over here we create some more tags so we can monitor the health of the connection from our ladder code these guys are really handy as you'll see in just a moment down here we set up the input output and configuration data of the powerflex drive for the input data we want the powerflex drive to only send data to us so we'll select unicast we'll have it send the information to us four times a second every 250 milliseconds that's fine and the connection point for this drive which in the documentation they refer to that as the assembly instance is a 1. now we need to create an array to accept the input data from the drive so we give it a name the software reminds us that we haven't actually created that tag yet and it gives us an opportunity to do so i really love that i don't have to create my tags ahead of time i can just create them on the fly as i go let's see according to the documentation we need for these to be 16-bit unsigned integers and depending upon the setup you have you may need up to 12 of these so let's go ahead and plan ahead for that and say okay now how many of those elements you use depends on what kind of multi-drive setup you have we're only using a single drive and according to the documentation we only need four of those elements to do that setup great that was our input data this is the data coming from the flex drive to us let's go look at the output data we can set up the interval that determines how often we send the drive data and this is totally independent from the one that we saw in the input these could be different numbers we'll go ahead and leave this one at the same four times a second like we had in the input data the connection point for the output data or assembly instance as they refer to it in the drive documentation is a 2. we need to create an array of output data that the ethernet ip protocol can send down to the drive and according to the documentation for the drive those need to be 16 bit integers and it can be up to 10 of those again depending on the drive configuration now for our setup with only a single drive we only need to send two of those elements now some devices require a four byte status header be sent with the output data the powerflex is one of those devices so we need to make sure that this box right here is checked perfect we've done the input data the output data now we set the configuration data the configuration field is required for this drive but with a zero data length this drive uses six as the connection point or assembly instance and we do need to create a dummy array even though we're not going to use it and i'll just set aside a little eight bit unsigned integer one element well that's it we're done now the software is reminding me that i haven't actually created any of these status tags that we just set up and it even suggests the appropriate data types how cool is that now the only thing i want to change here is strings it allocates 15 characters for the strings i like to make those extra large just in case i get some long messages so give me just a second to fix that there's one more right there and we're good to go let's do one more thing let's go back into the configuration here and hit this monitor button what that does is it takes all the tags we just created and builds a single data view for us all in one place i love that feature so i don't have to go manually build that data view myself great all of our tags been defined and our powerflex 40 drive adapter is all set up using the implicit messaging of the ethernet ip protocol awesome okay let's give it a try let's transfer the program down to the productivity3000 and bring up our data view we created here's that pf40 tab on the data view that was created for us by that monitor button i'm going to expand the input and the output arrays and now all we need to do to enable communications with the drive is flip this enable bit right here so i click on him write that out and sure enough we're connected we're online and we have a successful connection now just for the heck of it i'm going to unplug the ethernet cable and let's see what happens here well look our status changed we got a 516 error and the description says it's error number 204 well in the help file with the productivity3000 is this awesome table listing all the possible errors you can get with this thing error 204 says we have a timeout well we know that we just unplugged ethernet cable so let me plug that back in and without doing anything productivity3000 automatically recognize we regain that connection re-establish the connection and we're back up and running so as you can see having all these status tags is really really handy when you need to debug what's going on with your system now let's just try a couple things if i put a a 20 hex in here it should change the direction of the motor let's try that and sure enough it does you can see that little led change right on the drive if i put a 2 in here and then write that out the motor goes into run mode now i haven't specified an output frequency yet so the drive is running but it's not doing anything you specify the output frequency here let's go to 20.5 hertz the decimal point is implied here of course so i write that out and sure enough the motor ramps up to the 20.5 hertz now it's a little bit of a pain to enter the data and have to click this right button each time you want to do anything so let me show you a little trick here if you go up to options under the data view tab you can enable auto edits now if i want to stop the drive i just put a 1 here and as soon as i hit return that automatically gets written out and the drive ramps down to 0 hertz let's turn the drive back on for one second again i'm just going to enter a 2 and hit return you can actually see the frequency right here in our input array now normally your ladder code would be the one flipping these bits and changing these values of course we've intentionally used the data view to do it here just to make the point that all of this data transfer happens independent of your ladder code we haven't written one rung of ladder code yet have we but when you do write your ladder code all you have to do is manage these local arrays and ethernet ip implicit messaging takes care of transferring the data back and forth for you in the background all we did was drop a generic client onto the screen here in the hardware configuration and fill in the blanks we also hit that monitor button to automatically create that data view for us once that was done we transferred the program down to the controller and opened up our data view from the data view we enabled the messaging again your ladder code would normally do that we verified we had a good connection and then we could tell the drive what to do and what frequency to do it at right here in this output array when we entered these values the ethernet ip protocol automatically took those and transferred them down to the drive easy well that ought to be enough to get you up and running with an allen bradley power flex drive on the productivity 3000 using the implicit messaging of the ethernet ip protocol check out the other videos in this series for more tips on using the ethernet ip with this productivity 3000 and don't forget automationdirect's tech support is always free and you'll always talk to a real live person here in the u.s within minutes please keep in mind that while support will be happy to help you with any productivity 3000 ethernet ip questions you may have if you have any questions about the allen bradley devices you'll need to contact alan bradley's support automationdirect doesn't sell or support allen bradley devices performance plus value that's productivity from automationdirect