RS Net Worx- Device Net

[JMK 0]

Hi All... For those not aware, AB has a "recall" on Power Flex 4 and 40 drives with a FRN of 2.003 and earlier. There is a bad capacitor that fails upon power-up... Contact your AB rep for more information. With that said, I have a lot of these older PFlex drives in my plant. A good number of these drives lie on a Device Net network. Our techs get rather confused when it comes to replacing these drives... They will program the specific parameters via the keypad, but the drive / line will not run. Some of the time, the drive will fault out with a N71 (net comm loss). All of the time, the Device Net scanner will have an N78 (Identity Mis Match) with respect to the replaced node. I have to go online through RS Net Worx and correct the identity mis-match (FRN 1.007 NEQ FRN 5.001). This takes care of the network communications issue. The part that confuses me is downloading the parameters to the drive via Net Worx. I have a configuration file saved, which has all of the current parameters for each individual drive. It seems that when I / We download to the device, the parameters don't take. They stay at default... Has anyone experienced similar issues?

[gmferg 1]

I have not used PFlex 4 or 40s. I am familiar with the 70 and 700 lines. If you performed a full upload of all parameters on a drive that was setup correctly, you should be able to then download those settings to a new drive which is at least communicating with RSNetworx. After downloading, did you cycle power to the drive? Some parameter changes are not active until drive is restarted. What sort of comms module do these drives have? Are they software setup or dip/rotary switch? Software settings will typically download with a drive download. Dip/rotary settings will have to be done manually. Error 78 = Device is in scanlist but does not exist. Scanner does not see this node on the network. Are you setting the node address and baud rate on the new drive to match the old drive?

[JMK 0]

gmferg - Thanks for the reply! The Power Flex drives in question use a 22-COM-D interface card to link the drive to Device Net. The Node address and baud rate are fixed by the dip switches on said module. The communications faults occur when a new drive is installed (replacing an existing failed drive). The 22-COM-D module is not replaced, so the node address and baud rate aren't changed. I have narrowed the communications faults to "Identity Mis-Match" due to the FRN revision number being different than the original configuration. After I corrent the Identity issue, I proceed to "Download to Device". A process bar appears and looks as if all of the parameters are being downloaded. I "Upload fron Device" after the download completes to verift that the parameters have changed but they didn't. They all remain at default. I can change the parameters while online. That method works fine.

[Ken Roach 194]

That might be where the issue is happening if you are performing a "Resolve Device Mismatch" in the main network view of RSNetworx and not in the Scanlist of the scanner. There should be an informational message that appears in the Messages window with a description something to the effect of "Identity of device at Node xx has been changed, but configuration data could not be retained". What's happening is that RSNetworx considers the version 5 firmware of the PowerFlex drive to be different enough from the version 1 firmware of the drive that it cannot copy the parameters saved for the older drive into the configuration for the new drive. Instead, it just redefines a node in the project for the new drive and sets all the parameters to the EDS defaults. When you perform a Download to Device, those defaults get loaded into the new drive. Probably the only way to avoid this is to print a report of the drive parameters and manually enter those into the new drive. Watch the Messages window carefully next time you do one of these replacements (generate that report first !) to see if that's what is happening.