WEG CFW100 & CFW300/320 VFD Copy/Paste Parameters Between Drives from AutomationDirect

The Flash Memory Module – or MMF – gives you a super easy way to copy and paste parameters and SoftPLC applications between drives. Let’s do an example on these CFW100 drives. I’ll go to parameter 100 – the drives acceleration – and set it to a 1 for the first drive and then go over to the second drive and set it to a 2 just to make it easy to keep track of which drive is which. And I’ll remove power from the drives. The manual says to wait 10 minutes for the power to dissipate. I’ll fast forward the video through that … The MMF uses three triple A batteries - which you need to provide – and they get installed in here. I’ll make sure the drive is not powered, and then plug the MMF into the first CFW100 drive. Turn on the MMF. The MMF provides all of the power the drive electronics need to run so don’t apply external power to the drive. You can tell the drive is under MMF control because the drive’s LCD screen doesn’t have the yellow backlight on. One side note: The MMF automatically drops into power save mode after 10 seconds. Since I’m freezing the video while I am explaining things, a lot of what I do will appear to take longer than 10 seconds. In real-time, I am making sure I push a button at least every 10 seconds. If you don’t press a button every 10 seconds the MMF LCD will still be on because it draws very little power, but the MMF will become un-responsive to button presses. If that happens, just power cycle the MMF and continue on. The CFW100 will usually end up in PASTE mode, the CFW300 will usually end up in READY mode. Either way, press P to get to the parameters and go to parameter 319. Press P to go into that and we see it’s a zero which says to copy both the parameters and the application. Let’s change that to a 1 to tell it to copy only the parameters. Press P to exit. Go to parameter 318 and enter a 1 for copy mode and hit P. We see we are in copy mode. Hit OK to copy the parameters from the drive to the MMF. That can take several seconds depending on how much needs to be copied. Power down the MMF and remove it from the drive. Go to drive number 2 – make sure it is not powered, again the MMF should never be plugged into a powered drive - and plug in the MMF. Turn on the MMF. We see the drive is ready and the MMF is already in PASTE mode. So we just hit OK and the parameters get transferred to the new drive. Because the MMF is powering the drives control electronics, we can simply go look at parameter 100 and see that it does in fact now have the first drive’s 1-second acceleration. Perfect. That’s all there is to it, but there are a couple things you need to be aware of. Even though the MMF uses the same connector as a mini USB port, they are NOT USB ports. The wiring is completely different, and you risk destroying the drive and your USB device if you plug a USB device into this port. On the CFW300 drive, the MMF Port is up here under this little slide out door. When in parameter 318 or 319, if you select the wrong value, just hit P again and start over. Turning the MMF on is what starts the sequence of events. If you get stuck, just power cycle the MMF and start over. You can type in a password in parameter 0 if the password has been set up and enabled by parameter 200. Parameter 23 shows the software version of the MMF. Parameter 24 shows the software version of the drive that the parameters were copied from and parameter 25 shows the software version of the PLC application that was copied. Parameter 27 shows which device the parameters were copied from and parameter 28 shows which device the application was copied from. You can only copy from a CFW300 to another CFW300 or a CFW100 to another CFW100. You can’t copy parameters from one family and paste them into another. The MMF times out after 10 seconds. If you don’t press a button within 10 seconds the MMF will become non-responsive. If that happens, just power cycle it and start over. The parameters are retentive in the MMF even if you take the batteries out. Because the MMF powers all of the control electronics in the drive, you can paste a common new configuration into a drive, then go change just the serial address for example to make each drive unique all without ever applying power to the drive. Which means you can configure all of your drives BEFORE you wire them into your system! That’s really convenient! All of the error codes, alarms and parameters are in the product guide that comes with the drive. And if you misplace that guide, you can always download it for free from the automationdirect.com. That ought to be enough to get you started with the flash memory module. 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.