GSoft2: Part 3 - How to backup and restore parameters on the GS4 Variable Frequency Drive (VFD)

Saving and restoring parameters with GSOFT2 couldn’t be easier. Just connect to the drive like always, and go to the parameters dialog. Click this button to Read all the parameters from the drive. We see the drive parameters menu pop up over here and all the parameters from the drive fill in this chart. Let’s save the parameters – from the drive – to computer’s hard drive. Now when we open that file we just saved, it puts it down here under the FILE parameters. So these are the parameters read from the variable frequency drive and these are these are the parameters read from the computer’s hard drive. We can even do a compare where we see any drive’s parameters that are different than the default, the file parameters that are different from the default, and the difference between the file and the drive parameters, which since we haven’t changed anything shows nothing. Let’s change a couple of the file parameters just a little bit, do a compare and sure enough it gives us a list of exactly what the differences are between the drive and the file parameters. Perfect. When I hit WRITE ALL, we see a list of all of the parameters that are about to be written and can tell from the values that we are about to write the FILE parameters, not the drive parameters. Remember – when you change the drive parameters, they update the drive instantly, so there is no need to write them in bulk. And you can de-select any parameters you don’t want to overwrite. I’ll deselect a few of these were not changing anyway. Great, let’s write these file parameters to the drive. Uh oh. What happened. And look at the drive – it has a fault. Why? That’s because you have to have permission from the drive to over-write all of the drive’s parameters. And this dialog is reminding us that to get that permission, we have to set parameter 9.06 to a 1. Let’s clear the drive fault by pressing RESET and go to the DRIVE parameters, parameter 9.06, and set it to a 1. Hmm … that didn’t take. Did it? Why not? Well, think about it … it doesn’t make any sense to get permission remotely to write remotely – does it? No, of course not. Someone needs to have put the for thought into enabling remote writes or someone needs to be physically at that drive to make sure it’s ok to enable remote writes. In either case, someone has to make a conscious decision its ok to remotely update the drive. It’s all about safety. So, let’s manually enter a 1 in parameter 9.06 via the keypad, and now if we hit WRITE ALL, ahh, now it works as expected. We see a list of the parameters that were written and if any parameters failed to write, we would see that here. Perfect. Parameter 9.06 doesn’t survive a power cycle, so every time the drive power is cycled you have to go re-enable parameter 9.06, again, to ensure that you really did mean to allow remote writes to the drive. We are using a 1 horse power drive, but suppose we wanted to upgrade to a larger drive but use these parameters. That’s what this rating button is for. Let's change to a 10 hp drive. It builds a new set of File Parameters and uses as many of the current parameters as it can and changes all the defaults to match what the 10 hp drive expects. Of course, if we hit the compare button, we can see an exact list of differences between the new 10 horse power file parameters and the original 1 hp drive parameters. It also changes the drive model number, so if we now try to write this file to the 1 hp drive, we get a fault because of the mismatch. GSOFT2 won’t let you put parameters intended for one drive in a different sized drive. I love that. So the bottom line is, it’s super easy to read the parameters from a drive, save them to disk, read them back, make any changes you want and write all the parameters to the drive IF the copy parameters is enabled and the parameters aren’t locked out. That makes it super easy to configure a lot of drives and avoid all of that manual keypad entry stuff. Click here to learn more about the GS4 drive. Click here to learn about AutomationDirect’s free support options. And click here to subscribe to AutomationDirect’s YouTube channel so get notified when we post new videos.