WEG CFW VFD Quick Start 2 WPS Software from AutomationDirect

The WEG Programming software allows you to manage multiple drives. The group of drives is called a configuration and each drive is a resource. So, the workflow is simple: create a configuration, then add as many resources to that configuration as you need. And by the way, WPS isn’t limited to just the CFW300 drive, it’s used for lots of other WEG devices! Like PLCs, Safety, Controllers, Servos, etc … Which means everything we talk about in this video will apply to those too! Once you have setup your configuration, you can then configure the resources, monitor the resources, view trends, etc. for any device in the configuration. Let’s do a simple example using just a single WEG CFW300 VFD. Bring up the WPS software. Create a new configuration. Enter a name for the configuration and a path to store it at. There has to be at least one resource, so you name the first one here. I’m using a 485 com module and this USB to RS485 adapter to communicate with this PC. If we plug the USB adapter into the PC and open the device manager, we see that the PC registers that as a serial port at this port number, so we select serial port and put that com port number here. The rest of these are the default values for the drive and I haven’t changed those, so, I’ll hit test and we see we are on-line and ready to go. Perfect. If you are not currently online, then you can select your device here. We are on-line and because we hit that test button in the previous dialog, WPS already knew we were talking to a CFW300 drive and that we have an I/O module plugged in to the drive. If you are not sure what device is out there, then you can hit this Identify device button and it will automatically identify it for you This dialog allows you to convert ladder code created in WLP into WPS. We don’t need to do that so just hit Finish. And we are back at our Welcome screen - with one difference – we now have a configuration to work with. There’s our resource and there’s all the stuff associated with that resource. Double click on this and we can view and change the parameters just like we did in the previous video. We can start programming ladder code for the SoftPLC – that’s a big topic so we’ll do that in a separate video. Finally, we can do diagnostics and the wizards. Let’s take a closer look at those powerful tools. With this Monitoring Variable Diagnostic, we can create a custom table of variables we want to monitor. That can be parameters, system variables or SofPLC variables - any variable in the entire resource. Right click, give it a name ad look, our new variable monitoring table appears down here. You can then add global or local variables. If local, then you can actually select which ladder file to pull the from. And you can search which is a super easy way to find variables. We’ll use this a lot in the SoftPLC videos. For now, just beware that you have this powerful tool available to you. With Trend, you view up to 10 variables graphically in real time. We’ll show you how to use that in a separate video dedicated to just the Trend View. For both of these you can create as many different monitoring and trend views as you want and then just select the one you want when need it. These wizards are great – they show you all common things you will typically want to monitor in a nice clean format that’s easy to visualize. For example, it’s so much easier to double click on this Main Signals Wizard – of course I need to be connected t the drive for this to work - and instantly see everything I need to know about the drive in one place without having to remember that I need to look at parameter 295 to see the drives rated current or parameter 27 to see what kind of IO card is installed, etc. For example, If I watch the drive speed and status and reach over and hit the run button, sure enough I see what the drive is currently doing. So, this wizard shows me at a glance everything I need to know about the speed, current, voltage, temperature, VFD Status, alarms, faults and even the I/O Status. Which is all read only information. Wizards with a blank icon like this are read only wizards. Wizards with this icon have values you can change and have two buttons to help you manage that. The monitor button is already selected so WPS is polling the drive repeatedly right now and displaying the results on the screen. If I change parameter 402 on the drive, WPS shows the result on the screen. To write a value, you need to deselect the monitor button. Why? Because in monitor mode WPS is reading the values over and over, right? So, if a read occurs while you are trying to write, the value you are trying to write will get over written with the read value and then that read value will get written to the drive which isn’t what you wanted. So, be sure to exit the monitor mode before trying to write values. Notice that the background got a lot lighter when I de-selected the monitor button – that’s to remind you that you are not in monitor mode. So, to write values, just change any off-line parameters you want and then hit the write button. And we see the result appear at the drive. One side tip – you can’t write to the drive while you are editing a parameter on the drive. You must be outside of editing the parameter, change it in the wizard and write it out, then drop back into it on the drive to see the change. That ensures important parameters can’t be modified in two places at the same time and it applies to any parameter in that has this cfg indication in the parameter summary chart. This tab tells me my motor settings, this one is all about how the drive is controlled both for local and remote operations, here I can see what the keypad speed is currently set to and that it is stored in parameter 121. This one shows me my ramps and min and max speed references and even a plot to show me how they all fit together. It also shows me the functionality of the IO pins and the connector pinout. And there are even a sub tabs showing me the status of whichever IO Module I have plugged in. There is a wizard showing me how the LCD display is setup and how the data will be scaled. And again, I also see all the parameters associated with those values. The motor control wizards are cool because they show you graphically how all the parameters play together. And the overload wizard does the same thing. The bottom line is, these wizards make visualizing how your drive is configured so much easier than poking around with individual parameters and building your own variable monitoring window. Want to add another resource? Just right click the configuration and add one and go through all the same steps we just did in this example. To delete it, just right click and delete. WPS can even manage multiple configurations! Just create the new configuration exactly the same way we did in this video. There’s our new configuration and the resource we just created. And again, to delete it, just right click and delete. Well, that ought to be enough to get you going with Configurations and give you a pretty good idea of all the tools that are available to you to help monitor and debug the drive. Click here to learn more about the WEG CFW300 Variable Frequency Drive. Click here to see all of AutomationDirect’s free award-winning support options. And click here to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you will be notified when we publish new videos.