Kinetix 300 consumer reports

Who has used the Kinetix300 servo drives and how well have they performed?

I've been considering these for future projects and would also like to hear opinions.

Well, I will give you my experience so far.

The Kinetix 300 is a re-labled Lenze 940. AB had special firmware designed just for them to make the drives more just simple indexers.

I have had extensive experience with the Lenze940. When they work, they are a good value. When they don't work, it can be very costly. Generally the Lenze 940 doesn't have a lot of the filtering that higher end amps have. They do not deal well with applications that push the extremes of dyanamics, inertia mismatch, cable length, feedback resolution, and high accuracy positioning.

They also have a fairly high rate of failure, and are notorious for quirks and bugs.

Now for the Kinetix 300.
The version they are building for AB seems to be a bit more robust. We have used them on an OEM machine of my customers and have had no failures thus far.

Some quirks I don't like:

1) The motor power connector is a slip fit plug into the bottom of the drive. You have to strap it really well or the weight of the cable will cause the connections to be intermittent and cause arcing.

2) Remarkably, the have set this thing up to only accept normally open limit switches. If you want to utlize normally closed you need to run them through relays or some jerry-rig.

3) You can't define the positive direction of travel in software. Normally on most other systems you can set a bit that defines whether positive travel is CW or CCW. With these things you have to math it out and negate all your numbers if it happens to be the wrong polarity. I attempted to "out think" it and use a negative user unit scaling, but it had the last laugh.

4) Wasn't happy with the add on instructions that were developed for them in Logix5000. I ended up making my own.

5) Under certain circumstances, you can still have motor power even when the "enable" input is off.

Some things I did like:

1) Being able to have all the tags pre-assigned for the Enet communication.

2) We used the absolute feedback option. Home once and your done (until the battery dies or you screw somthing up) The aboslute feedback option was very inexpensive.

3) Automatic motor recognition worked perfect. Just hooked the motor up and it knew what was there and what the setting were.

4) Priced comparable to what Lenze sells the 940 for.

5) They come with a nice array of power inputs (including dual voltage and voltage doublers).

The reason I used them was quite simple. EthernetIP. When I have the choice, I do everything EnetIP.

I don't want to get too into these things though without getting warm and fuzzies from everyone else that they are not experiencing all the same Lenze quality issues that I am used to.

I did one axis of this, and I thought one of the biggest "lacks" was the inability to scale the motor encoder for useful purposes.
I ended up with very arcane math in the PLC, which (I am told) drove later users of the system to upgrade it to a 3000 ultra.
It "is what it is", and if you need a single axis on EthernetIP, this is pretty much your best (i.e. only) choice.

jdbrandt said:

I did one axis of this, and I thought one of the biggest "lacks" was the inability to scale the motor encoder for useful purposes.
I ended up with very arcane math in the PLC, which (I am told) drove later users of the system to upgrade it to a 3000 ultra.
It "is what it is", and if you need a single axis on EthernetIP, this is pretty much your best (i.e. only) choice.

Click to expand...

The feedback scaling for the Kinetix300 is scalable. No need to math it out in the PLC. Or am I misunderstanding what you mean?

One drawback that I found is you cannot adjust the current limit on the drive. We got a new machine in the plant that had several mechanical issues. The actuator would bind and pull the belt out of the carraige. While we were working on the mechanical side, it would have been nice to limit the current and prevent more damage to the belt. The motor was probably oversized, but we had to work with what we had.

As others have mentioned, though, the Ethernet I/P tags in RS Logix 5000 make programming very easy.

jdbrandt said:

I did one axis of this, and I thought one of the biggest "lacks" was the inability to scale the motor encoder for useful purposes.
I ended up with very arcane math in the PLC, which (I am told) drove later users of the system to upgrade it to a 3000 ultra.
It "is what it is", and if you need a single axis on EthernetIP, this is pretty much your best (i.e. only) choice.

Click to expand...

alwalker said:

One drawback that I found is you cannot adjust the current limit on the drive. We got a new machine in the plant that had several mechanical issues. The actuator would bind and pull the belt out of the carraige. While we were working on the mechanical side, it would have been nice to limit the current and prevent more damage to the belt. The motor was probably oversized, but we had to work with what we had.

As others have mentioned, though, the Ethernet I/P tags in RS Logix 5000 make programming very easy.

Click to expand...

The current limit on the drive CAN be adjusted as well. These parameters can be adjusted by using a web browser and accessing the drives internal webserver, or, can also be adjusted over EnetIP using explicit messaging.

ADDENDUM:

I just noticed that as of firmware update 1.40 the drive does indeed now support the use of normally closed limit switches as well.

Well, it was over 13 months ago, and lots changes in 13 months.
I may have been trying to set the scaling based on product data..i.e. dynamically change it. It's been too long, and to many projects since to remember.

jdbrandt said:

Well, it was over 13 months ago, and lots changes in 13 months.
I may have been trying to set the scaling based on product data..i.e. dynamically change it. It's been too long, and to many projects since to remember.

Click to expand...

Happens to me all the time.