Emerson Drives Part 2: Power Tools Pro

Nidec Digitax Unidrives SP Epsilon Drives Servo Control Techniques

This is part 2 of our demonstration on Nidec's (Emerson) family of servos. In Part 1, we discussed the hardware and features of Epsilon, Digitax, and Unidrive SP. Today I would like to give you a tour of the extremely intuitive programming software, Power Tools Pro.

Here's a look at Power Tools Pro. On the left-hand side is my menu tree. Here's where I do everything from a motor setup, setting up my IO, motion profiles, and more.

So for this example, to setup my demo unit I'm going to choose motor. On the top is my catalog of all the Nidec (Emerson) motors that are currently available. Most of these are pretty well set from the factory however I still recommend doing an auto tune. If you have a third party motor, you can choose Auto Tune and it will help tune that motor specifically to that drive.

For this I'm going choose XP604. Next I want to show you user units. Here's where you can set up let's say you have a gearbox, and you can choose how many motor rotations are per output shaft of the gearbox. Makes it pretty easy for setting up the rest of your motion profiles.

Setting up a Jog

First thing I'm going to do is set up my job. So for the jog, I'm going to choose a velocity of 200 with an acceleration of 150 and decel of 150. As you can see, it actually already calculated my time and how long it's going to take. Makes it pretty nice for seeing how this is actually going to operate.

Setting up a Home

Next thing I'm going to set up my home. This example I've chosen a velocity of negative 50 with an excell and decell of 50. Then I also want this to home out from my sensor and then to my marker for a little more precise home.

Setting up an index.

I'm going to choose an index distance of 200 revs and let's go a velocity of 1,000. With an Excel of 500 and decel 500. One of my favorite features is the graphical representation down below. It shows actually how long it's going to take, and how many revs, so it makes it pretty easy to understand without actually having to try to do it.

Setting up I/O

Next thing I want to do is my I/O setup. Here's where I can assign the inputs that are wired to my drive to how this thing is going to operate. So first thing I want to do is set up my jog. So I'm going to simply say I want the first switch to jog it plus. Drag and drop that over, and then let's do a minus jog as well. Then, I want to initiate let's say my home. Assign it to number-3 and then just to simulate the homing switch, let's assign that to input number four. And then finally, we need to assign something to initiate the index. Drag that one over to input number five.

Okay now that inputs are assigned, we're ready to download this and give it a try.

Go to device and download I'll look for the drive and it should download.

Now that we've downloaded, you can see we're online. l I can get a signal saying we're connected, and my actual position feedback. So if I want to try this out before anything is wired, I can do that.

So to try that out from this first leg jog and hit the arrow buttons left and right, Now as you can see based on my position feedback I'm actually moving. I can try out my home, let's hit the start button then I'm just gonna simulate turn on input number three, and it homed out.

Now let's try out my index. so without inputs wired at all, I can try this out. If you want to see the status of the inputs click on inputs and these boxes will actually highlight green when the inputs are on.

So let's go ahead and try the inputs now and see how well this thing works. Ok now that the drive is programmed, let's see if this works. First thing I'm going to do is try and jog, hit the first input that I've programmed going in forward direction and reverse.

Ok a homing sequence.

Simulate the prox switch,

back to the marker,

and now finally an index.

As you can see programming the drive is pretty simple. This was just a basic application, but these drives can do even more advanced profiles like gearing, camming, and can even go into a torque mode. As you have just seen Nidec (Emerson) servo’s are user friendly and can accommodate to almost any application.