IronHorse ACN NEMA 4X VFD Quick Start from AutomationDirect

Let’s get the shaft on this 1 horse power motor spinning using this 1 horse power Nema-4X Iron Horse ACN drive. I love that this family of drives has the option of a pre-installed built-in disconnect that’s ready to go out of the box. I’ll flip that on to apply power to the drive. Let’s reset the drive to factory default so you know exactly where I am starting from. Just right arrow over to the drive parameter group. I’ll down arrow to parameter 93 and select that by pressing the enter key. Change its value to a 1 and enter that. It blinks to ask you to verify that’s what you wanted and to give you one last chance to change your mind. If it isn’t what you wanted, hit escape to get out. It only blinks for a few seconds, so if it stops, hit enter to get it blinking again. This is what we want, so I’ll hit Enter while it’s blinking to accept it. Hit escape to get back to the main frequency display. Since I’m using a 1 horsepower drive with a 1 horsepower motor on a 60 hz 3 phase supply, most of the parameter defaults are already setup for us. By the way, all of the Ironhorse ACN drives can be run single phase, just make sure you connect to the R and T – or L1 and L3 - terminals if you use single phase AND you use an AC line reactor. That helps smooth out the DC bus ripple created by the single-phase supply. Let’s modify a few parameters to see how that works. How about a 2 second acceleration, a 4 second deceleration, and we’ll make the run stop command use the keypad run stop buttons and have the up down arrow keys on the key pad control the frequency. And let’s see how to reverse the motors direction. The cool thing about the ACN drive is while you can rotate through the parameter groups using the left and right arrow keys, the drive brings the most common parameters up to a top level operational menu that you access using the up down arrows keys. I love this chart in chapter 2 of the user manual. It shows you how you can scroll up and down through most often used parameters or you can scroll left right to access all the parameter groups and then use the up down arrow keys to access each groups members. For this video all we need is the acceleration, deceleration, drive command source, frequency source and forward reverse direction control so we only need this top-level Operations Group of parameters which we access using just the up down arrow keys. This chart showing that operations group of parameters – which I stole from the product insert that comes with the drive - will help us keep track of where we are. The drive is currently showing us the frequency display, so we are here on the chart. I’ll up arrow once and we get the acceleration parameter. Press enter to drop down into that and we see it’s a 20 second acceleration time. I’ll scroll over to the ones digit and change that to a 2 and scroll to the tens digit and change that to a zero. Press enter to select that, and press enter again while it’s blinking to accept it. And just like before, if it stops blinking, you’ll have to press enter twice. I’ll up arrow again to the deceleration parameter. Enter into that. You can scroll up or down to change vales, but it’s so much quicker to just scroll left or right and change each individual digit. Enter to select that and enter again to accept it. I’ll up arrow again to the drive command source selection. It defaults to a 1 which says use the input terminals for drive run stop control. We want to use the keypad which is a zero. Enter to select that and enter again to accept it. If I up arrow one more time we see the frequency source parameter. Enter into that. There are two ways to control the frequency from the keypad. The manual refers to them as keypad 1 and keypad 2. Keypad 1 says don’t change the frequency until you hit enter select it and enter again to accept it. Keypad 2 – which is a 1 - says change the frequency as you scroll. Let’s select that one and hit enter to accept it. I’ll hit escape to get back to the main frequency display. When I hit RUN we see the run and forward LEDs light up. Hit Enter to change the frequency. As I scroll through the frequencies the motor responds immediately. Exactly what we asked for. Let’s switch that to requiring an enter keypress to change the frequency. Escape out of here and up arrow to the frequency source select. Enter into that. If I try to change this nothing happens. Why? Well, you can’t change the frequency source while the drive is running. So I’ll hit stop, wait for the motor to spin down, and now I can change it to a zero for the keypad 1 operation. Escape to the frequency display and Hit RUN. Enter to change the drive frequency. Now when I change the drive frequency, nothing happens until I enter to select it and hit enter again to accept it. Perfect. To reverse the direction of the motor I’ll just down arrow once to the direction control and change it to R for reverse. Enter to select and enter again to accept. The motor immediately ramps down and ramps back up in the other direction. While the built in disconnect is handy, you should never use that to stop a motor. Always hit stop, wait for the motor to spin down, then remove power from the drive. While that should be enough to get you up and running quickly, know that this is a VERY capable drive so be sure to check out the other videos in this series to get the most out of your Ironhorse ACN drive. Especially the one on how to use the FREE drive configuration software. It makes commissioning your ACN drives a snap. And the product insert has a lot of really useful stuff like where to find the basic motor parameters, a horsepower to kilowatt converter, a quick wiring diagram, How to use external switches for command control and a potentiometer for frequency control, a list of fault codes, commonly used commands, I/O pin assignment codes, Dimensions, Mounting, Power wire sizes and screw torques, and a list of all the parameter groups. So, keep that guy handy. And if you do misplace it, you can always download a copy of it or any Ironhorse documentation including 3D models at automationdirect.com for free. Click here to learn more about the Ironhorse ACN drives. Click here to learn about AutomationDirect’s free award-winning support options and click here to subscribe to the channel so you will be notified when we publish more videos like these.