WEG CFW500 VFD PID Pump Genius Simplex Part 1 from AutomationDirect

The Pump Genius makes it super easy to configure a wide variety of pumping applications. You can use it to configure simple PID applications where you need to maintain things like system pressure or temperature or flow or even do things like tank filling applications. Or, you can use it to configure more complex pumping applications with multiple drives or even systems with a single drive and multiple contactors, so the drive can rotate through the pumps to ensure even wear. It can even handle deragging, sleep boost, alarms, pipe charging, dry pump protection, and pump protection via an external sensor. The Pump Genius is really comprehensive. But it’s done in a way that you don’t have to be a drive expert or a PLC guy. Just fill in the blanks and you are good to go. In this video, we’ll set up the usual motor parameters and build and install a version of the Pump Genius that is customized to work with our exact drive and firmware version. In Part 2 we’ll configure the Pump Genius parameters and download them to the drive, and in Part 3 we’ll do a live demo with a special focus on all of the amazing Pump Genius Monitoring dialogs where you can see everything that’s going on in your pumping application. We’ll do the exact same example as we did in the PID Quick Start videos where we wanted to use a single drive to automatically change the motor’s speed to maintain a system pressure of 6 psi regardless of how many valves we opened. Which means we’ll be using the exact same hardware as described in the PID Quick Start Hardware video so I’m not going to re-describe that here and I’m also not going to get too deep into any of the parameter descriptions – we already did that in the PID Quick Start Parameter video. That will help expedite this video. There is one change. The Pump Genius requires the auto/manual switch - if you choose to use one - to be on Digital Input 3. We did use it and had it on Digital Input 2 in the previous video, so I went ahead and moved that wire for this video. We also used the remote HMI in those videos. That uses the serial port. We’re going to need that serial port to load and monitor the Pump Genius so we won’t be using the remote HMI in this video. Could I have used a different I/O module with two serial ports? Or used the USB module? Sure! But I'm intentionally using the I/O module that comes with the drive because that will be the most common case and it only has the one serial port. It’s important to understand that the Pump Genius uses a differenent PID implementation than the SoftPLC version we did in the PID videos. It uses the exact same concepts so it will look real familiar, but this version uses different SoftPLC parameter numbers. Just keep that in mind. Ok, here we go … I reset the drive parameters to factory default and the drive’s SoftPLC to the default app to give us a clean slate and so you know exactly where I am starting from. Step 1: Motor Parameters. Use the drive's start-up menu to walk you through setting up your motor – it configures things like overload settings behind the scenes based on the motor you specify. These are the basic parameters for my motor – yours will probably be different. Step 2: Build a version of the Pump Genius to work on your specific drive and then load it into the drive. The Pump Genius is part of the WLP Ladder Logic editor from WEG. You can download WLP for Free from AutomationDirect by going to any of the CFW500 drives and scrolling down to the support resources section where you’ll find the WPS application along with firmware updates, EDS files, sample programs, etc. Download and install this guy. In WLP, you don’t need to create a new project. You can just go directly to Tools, Application, CFW500, Create, Pump Genius. We’re doing a single pump so we choose Simplex. Give the project a name, but don’t use any spaces. The WLP software doesn’t like that. Ignore these for now. It wants to update the Pump Genius project from the WLP version it was created with to the version of WLP we are using – we definitely want to do that. Since we just created a Pump Genius project, we now see it over here in the configuration wizards. Double click to open that and we see we have the Simplex version of the Pump Genius. Perfect. That’s where we will configure the Pump Genius parameters in the next video, but first, we have to get the Pump Genius into the drive’s SoftPLC, so cancel out of that. To build the Pump Genius for our drive’s firmware version, go to Build, Compile. Wait for it to finish. No hits, no runs, no errors. Perfect. Close that. Well, great! We now have a version of the Pump Genius that will work on our drive with our drive’s specific firmware version, so now we need to send it to the drive’s SoftPLC. To download this to the drive, WLP and the drive have to use the same communication protocol. So we go to Communicate, Configuration. I’m using this USB to RS485 converter and I see in the PC’s device manager it is plugged into this com port, so we put that here. My drive is already set up with these com parameters. Remember, com parameters survive factory resets. We just need to make sure WLP matches those. 9600 Baud, no parity, 8 bits, one stop bit. My USB to RS485 cable struggled with faster baud rates so that’s why I’m using 9600 Baud. If you are using the drive’s USB com module you would select 6 or 7 for Parameter 312. If you are using the 485 module with two RS485 ports, then set Parameter 312 to a 2 to use Port 1, or a 6 or 7 to use Port 2. Ok, we have a Pump Genius customized for our drive’s SoftPLC and coms are set up, so now we transfer it to the SoftPLC. But, before doing that, if we go to Parameter 1000 we see there is an app installed and it is currently stopped. That would be the default app we loaded at the beginning of this video. If you have an app and it’s not stopped, then go to Parameter 1001 and enter a 0 to stop it just to be sure we are not interrupting anything. To download the Pump Genius application to the SoftPLC go to Communicate, Download. We want to download the application. Looks like WLP needs to update some stuff. So we’ll re-build those modules and update it. This is all the modules to download, so we hit Start. Wait for it to transfer …. and it was successful. Perfect. The Pump Genius is now on the drive. It asks us if we want to enable it. Normally we would say yes here, but I’m going to hit No and then do it manually in Part 3 – to serve as a reminder to check the status of the application before using it. Take a break, let your head clear and then join me in Part 2 where we will do that configuration and then try it on our hardware. Meanwhile, click here to learn more about the WEG family of variable frequency drives. Click here to learn about 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.