EtherNet/IP: Part 2 - How to Verify Connectivity with the GS4 Variable Frequency Drive (VFD)

Normally, you’ll grab the GS4 Drive’s Electronic Datasheet from the AutomationDirect website, hand it to your system and it will create an GS4 Drive object that your system can talk to via EtherNet/IP. Easy. But what if you want to verify that EtherNet/IP is working with the drive, independent of your system? In this video, we’ll do exactly that. We’ll test the EtherNet/IP communications to the GS4 drive using nothing but a PC and a free software application we found on the internet. There are a number of tools available to do this, some free, some not. Use which ever one you are comfortable with. We’ll be using this free EtherNet/IP Explorer app in the video today. Looks like I am using version 0.5, so if you are following along make sure that’s the version you have. One word of caution: This is NOT an AutomationDirect product, so please don’t call support asking for help with this application. They probably won’t know anything about it. And, if you look at the app’s help file, the author makes no promises … so use it at your own risk. But, for our purposes, it’s fine. Because we really want to know is if we setup EtherNet/IP correctly in the GS4 drive. If open the interface and enter the IP Address of the PC’s Network Interface Card that we are using – mine is this – yours will probably be something different –the Ethernet/IP Explorer App sends out a broadcast message to all devices on the network asking if any are EtherNet/IP devices. Looks like our GS4 Drive responded – perfect! We now know we can talk to the drive via EtherNet/IP. And if we click on that – the app automatically retrieves the identity class information. Vendor ID, Product name, seral number, etc. Which says, not only can we find the device, but we can pull data from it too. Awesome. That’s really all we wanted to know – can we connect to the drive via EtherNet/IP. BUT - if you want to take a peek under the hood and see how EtherNet/IP works check out the next video where we will actually dig into EtherNet/IP using this EtherNet/IP Explorer tool and we’ll show you how to command the drive to run, stop, change frequency, change direction, etc. all from your PC. Click here to learn more about the GS4 Drive. Click here to learn about all of AutomationDirect’s Free support options. And click here to be notified when we publish new videos.