Square D Altivar 61 VFD and C-More EA7-T6CL

Hope to get some input and suggestions from anyone who has had a similar project.

Need to control (very low level) 7 different Altivar 61 inverters for Start/Stop, Speed adjustment, and also to display the drive status and speed on the screen(s) of the Adutomation Direct C-More EA7-T6CL touchscreen.

What is my best method of communicatining with the VFD ? Ethernet ?

I understand the Altivar drives have a built in Modbus comm protocol, is this correct ?

Any help that anyone could render will be extremely appreciated.

Silly to re-invent the wheel if I don't have to.

Thanks !

welcome to the site
This is a quaetion of cost.
If the drives and the screen have E/net - use it
If it is Modbus over RS485 (this might be the standard) use that.
Be wary an RS485 connection can use RJ45 conectors. these are not E/Net.
even though they look like it.

EDIT
There are other bus connections
CANOPEN
Profibus

Altivar 61

I think that the RJ-45 on the Altivar is an RS-485 connection, using Modbs protocol over 485. It has been hard to get info from Schinder though.

Hope I'm not over my head, kinda scary swimming with the big fishes. LOL

I cant help you with Automation Direct - But I can post a program which uses Twido Suite and has the modbus messaging for temperaturre controls and Canopen bus for Altivar drives.
the Twido suite software is free download

Thank you for any help you can give me. Sometimes the mfg. isn't much help or assumes that all their users have software engineering backgrounds.

You can use canopen or modbus. The drive coms port uses these two as standard protocols.
Pretty sure on in the communication menu you have a com scanner in and com scanner out tables. You can then setup the com scanner in table with whatever register you want to "publish" Any controller on the modbus can then read these registers.
Attached is the register lists available