WEG CFW500 VFD Remote Keypads from AutomationDirect

?The WEG CFW500 drives have two remote keypads to choose from. One is just a direct copy of the drive's keypad. The other one has a full alphanumeric text display so you can actually see what the parameters are without having to remember a bunch of parameter numbers or having to keep the manual handy. And, it’s IP56 rated, which means it’s protected from water even if it is projected from jets. And they are super easy to set up. Both HMIs are wired to any I/O module with a serial port like this using this cable which is available in four different lengths. These are the pinouts for the I/O module that comes with the drive. If you are using a different I/O module, it probably uses different pin numbers so please don’t assume this pinout will work in your setup if you aren’t using the default I/O module. This is RS485 so make sure the termination resistors are enabled by setting these switches to ON. Let’s start with the basic HMI. The other end of the cable just plugs into the back of remote HMI. When we power up the drive, it gives us a Connection Lost message if the serial port hasn’t been previously set up. And since the drive's display is still backlit, we know it is in control right now. Go to Parameter 312 and set it to a 0 to tell the drive we have an HMI connected to the serial port. When we do that, the drive brings the remote HMI online. We know the remote HMI is in control now because the drive's backlight turned off. The drive's HMI is still active – I’ll use it to bring us back up to the top level. We see the remote HMI tracks it perfectly. And now the remote HMI works exactly like the drive's HMI. We can scroll through the parameter groups, modify parameters, and control the drive. There really isn’t anything special to note here about operating the remote HMI. There is one thing to beware of: The remote HMI uses a serial port. Since I am using the default I/O module that comes with the drive and it only has one serial port, I don’t have any ports left to communicate with other devices or even the WPS configuration software. Here are the I/O modules AutomationDirect has available at the time I am making this video and here’s how many serial ports each module has. Of course, you can communicate with the Free WPS configuration software using USB so that would be one way to free up a serial port. Or you could communicate using Modbus TCP or EtherNet/IP. For anything else though, if you want to use the remote HMI and talk to other devices, you will want to use a module that has two serial ports. The HMI serial port was dedicated back when we set Parameter 312. One last thing on the basic HMI. It comes with these guys which you can slide into here for panel mounting. OK, let’s do the alphanumeric HMI. Before setting up the alphanumeric HMI, let’s go to Parameter 204 and set it to a 5 to reset the drive to 60 Hz factory default. Hmmm, interesting. The remote HMI is still active – why? Because factory reset doesn’t reset the serial port parameters. That’s so if you do a factory reset from a remote device, like we just did here, the device will still be able to communicate with the drive after reset. Let’s scroll down to the modified parameters list and yep – the parameter that tells the drive an HMI is using the serial port is still there. I’m going to change that back to the Default 2 so we start with a factory fresh drive for our intro to the alphanumeric HMI. And we see we lost coms. Perfect. Power down the drive and wait for it to go completely down. Remove the cable from the basic HMI and connect it to the alphanumeric HMI. Power back up. We get a communication lost message because we haven’t set it up yet. And we can tell the drive’s HMI is still in control because the drive’s backlight is still lit. On the drive’s HMI, go back to Parameter 312 again and tell the drive we are using the serial port for the HMI by setting it to a 0. The lost coms message is gone now. Go to Parameter 215 and change it to a 1 to tell the drive we are using the alphanumeric HMI. The backlight on the drive's HMI turns off to tell us the remote HMI is now online. But it’s giving us an error and it’s in the default language of Portuguese. The error is telling us we need to set the date and time. The alphanumeric HMI has a built-in battery-operated clock/calendar so you need to set that up to clear the alarm. But let’s fix the language first so we can see what we are doing. You can use either display, let’s use the remote HMI. Even though it isn’t labeled, I know this is the same as this backup or escape key so I’ll hit it a few times to get back to the top level. I know from the manual that the language parameter is Parameter 201, and the quickest way to get there is via the HMI parameter group. Even though I can’t read Portuguese, I can see this is the HMI group. Enter that and scroll to Parameter 201. Select that. Scroll up to English. How cool is that? I didn’t have to remember that English was a “1.” It was spelled out for me. Accept that and now everything is in English! Awesome. We still have the date/time alarm, so let’s fix that. That’s also in this HMI parameter group so I’ll just scroll up to the day of the week and change it to the current day. As soon as we do that the alarm goes away. I’ll fast forward through setting the other date and time parameters. It’s important that you get those set up so this HMI shows the correct time and especially if you plan to use them in the Soft PLC. Back up to the top level and we are ready to go! The first thing you notice is these guys are soft keys. There function is shown up here. This one doesn’t currently do anything so there isn’t anything there. Otherwise this alphanumeric HMI operates exactly like the drive’s HMI. The big difference is in the displayed information. The top level display shows all the same information, but the larger units are much easier to read, and we get units and actual numbers with the bar graph – no more guessing what the bar graph is trying to tell us. And we see the current time which is battery backed up so it persists through a power cycle. If the battery is removed or dies, it will hold the last known value so you can tell when it happened. The best part, though - as we have already seen - is everything is spelled out for you. Let’s go to the basic parameters group and just scroll through some. And look at that! Instead of just a parameter number – I can see exactly what each parameter is. And then you can drop into a parameter and change it just like with the drive’s HMI. The alphanumeric HMI comes with two screws so you can use to mount it to a panel. The cut-out dimensions are in the install guide. And changing the battery is easy. Just twist this guy to open the cover, pop the battery out and replace it. It’s a standard CR2032 battery, which you can get at AutomationDirect under this part number – it’s the same battery that’s used in the Do-more PLCs. So having two different kinds of remote keypads, one of which is IP56 rated, is just another reason the WEG CFW500 drive is such a great value. Click here to learn more about the WEG CFW500 Drive. 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 more videos like this one.