New hardware can SUCK *vent*

dwoodlock

Lifetime Supporting Member
Join Date
Nov 2012
Location
Cincy/nKY
Posts
548
Hello all,

So for the past week and a half I had been dealing with a drive issue. It actually began the week before, but I was out of the country, so they added to my to-do list.

perfect welcome back present:mad:

Anyway, we have about 6 bruderer presses,and they had all been relocated to a new location over the previous weeks. We put power back on one of them, and the siemens simodrive 611A decided that it would give up on life.

These drives are fairly old, and the display simply stopped working, no indicators, just dead.

these drives have 2 "modules" referred to as IR module and LT module. IR module is where the AC is stored in caps, and then turned into whatever voltages the drive requires to operate. The LT module has a control board, along with some other electronics that hold parameters and determine what type of output is emitted.

so anyway first step was to replace the IR module with a brand new spare that we had sitting on the shelf since 2013. Hooked it up and all the displays worked again, but it refused to run. No faults, just didn't turn on.

This is about the point where I got involved.

I started off checking the basics, input voltage, tracing the control wiring, examining logic, reloading the oem logic from the Eprom.

None of this worked, nothing changed, no progress. At this point the press needed to run so we could make an order.

We made the call to change the drive out with a working unit from one of our other presses. At this point I felt like after moving the press something that was un-wired was wired back incorrectly. Based on that assumption I didn't think the functional drive would be a success, but much to my surprise it fired up without any issues at all. swaptronics ftw

So now we are playing musical drives every few days in order to meet order demands for 2 customers.

I sent the original drive off to a local repair house, that has done great work with siemens stuff for us before. I asked them to do their best to retain the parameter set, so that when it was fixed I could ideally hook it up and get it rolling without issue.

In the meantime I ordered a new control board pre-parameterized from the OEM and installed it in my new LT module and installed the assembly into the press I had stolen the functional drive off of. I anticipated it would plug and play....WRONG

Was generating a fault on the drive controller, the newer module was a different version than the controller had been parameterized for. I did some reading and found out what parameter I needed to change, and went about the process to do that from the buttons on the front of the controller. I had to reinitialize the drive, which as I found out, means to wipe all the parameters and start from scratch, Lovely.

I made it about half way through the parameterization which was hundreds of parameters and then decided that it was ludicrous. I did some reading on siemens technical forums and downloaded the interface software, MS-DOS based old stuff but I have a PG with XP, so I took a crack at getting it working.

I was able to get it working, but now came the struggle to get the right cable, or find the right pin-out. Took quite a while, but after talking to tech support I was able to find the correct pin-out.

com port wouldn't communicate with the drive. Occasionally it acted like it wanted to, and would work for a few seconds, and then it would say the connection was faulted.

I was using the version of XP on my pg that is setup to interface with S5 hardware, I anticipated that it would play nice with this software since they are both from the 16 or 32 bit generation...WRONG

Today after thinking it wouldn't ever work, I happened to boot it up in standard xp mode, and voila(french accent) it worked.

turns out the S5 setup holds the com port and wont let go, making the IBS software useless. Additionally I noticed that the whole computer got slow as molasses when I was running the IBS software, but I thought it was related to the software being run in compatibility mode more than anything else.

So anyway I can finally interface with the drive, and the OEM had since sent me the parameter file. Installed the parameter file and manipulated the LT module hardware setting in the parameters so that it would work....and......SAME PROBLEM

sits there with no faults, and just refuses to start, or even charge up the dc link.

So anyway later on we opened up the IR module to make sure that the contactor for the incoming power was functioning correctly.

Immediately upon opening the case, we notice that the 8 pin phoenix connector that has all the wires from the contactor, was only partially connected to the PCB. *******S!!!

So anyway at that point we tested to make sure the contactor would operate when 24v was applied, and it did. Put it back together with the connector fully engaged, and what do you know it fires up first time without any issues.

So anyway this sucked! Just thought I would share my frustration and misadventure with you guys. Just cause it comes out of a new box, doesn't mean its right. 2.5 weeks lost due to poor assembly at the mfr.

cheers.
 
Something that any of us that troubleshoot problems with machinery needs to chant to themselves occasionally is:

New means Not Used.
New doesn't mean Good.


Congrats on finding the problem... at least now you're that much further along should you ever need to connect to the drives again.
 

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