Micro830 to Powerflex Communications. I though this was supposed to be easy>

A/B has been touting their Micro800 Connected Components line with the ability to simply drag and drop Powerflex drives into the project but now that I'm into a project it seems that dropping a Powerflex drive into the project does nothing for you except replace Drive Explorer. It appears that the only way to communicate with the drives is via Explicit MODBUS messages. Am I missing something here or is this the way it is. At least with MicroLogix they had a library of proven code for Powerflex you could just drop in and use.

I'm not that impressed with the Micro800 line so far. Having to map all of your PLC registers to Modbus addresses just to talk to a Panelview? Seems like Disconnected Components to me.

The recently available Micro850 controllers have EtherNet/IP communications provisions, however you will not be able to "implicitly" control any other devices; you could use EtherNet/IP to explicitly MSG data packets, maybe a bit easier than mapping Modbus.

This is a pretty "cheap" platform; I haven't expected any Logix features since it was developed to be used within "micro" sized control systems.

Rockwell now has a User Defined Function Block available for just this purpose. Seems to work pretty well so far.

Content ID: MMS_061759
Unified Reg. ID: 48076
Catalog Numbers: 2080
Title (EN): Micro800 UDFB: PowerFlex 4 Class Drives
Description: This sample code provides two Micro800 UDFBs to provide status and command information for PowerFlex 4 Class Drives via Modbus RTU.