Kadet to Danfoss VTL5125

Has anyone used a G304K2 to communicate to a Danfoss VLT series VFD using the Crimson Danfoss VLT/FC protocol?

I have an application with a Micrologix 1400 and G304K2, triplex pump station with Danfoss VLT drives.. All the other stations at this site have Yaskawa VFDs that support Modbus but this one does not, so to save a boatload of wring and keep all the sites as functionally similar as possible I'd like to use Gateway blocks in the little Kadet to let the Micrologix read the basic VFD status values (speed, amps, faults) and write the speed command and run forward command.

If someone has done this and has some insight for me I'd sure appreciate it.

Paul

According to Red Lion tech support it should work just fine. I will add an example here when I get the details sorted out.

What a PITA this is turning out to be.

Got comms right off the bat, but now I cannot get any of the parameter reads to work. The Danfoss FC protocol in Crimson says they're all "Long as Long". The Danfoss book has several different data types. The Only tidbit resembling an example in the Red Lion technote says "i.e. P600 is the
drive operating hours." I get zero, although this drive has several thousand run hours on its display.

Also, when I pick an address, I see P followed by a numeric field, followed by a colon and another numeric field. I have tried all sorts of values in the 2nd field. I always get zeroes. The Tag ends up with a "treat as" choice of signed integer or floating point. The Danfoss book says they're unsigned 16 bit integers or 32 bit integers. I don't know if that is a driver problem in Crimson or what... I suspect that the 2nd filed in the address is for arrays, and when I leave it as zero, the resulting data source looks right "P600".

Okay, so I gave up on that and went to see if I can simply start and run the drive.

So Danfoss makes me set a half dozen bits to start the drive, great, no problem. I can start the drive using the Crimson CTRL word. I can change the speed using the protocol BUS word...one problem though...I cannot change the speed while the VFD is running.

Goofy bastages made this way too difficult.

I am referring to the VLT 5000 Aqua manual and the Red Lion Danfoss FC protocol technote. The Red Lion technote is nearly worthless.

I am setting bits 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 in the control word. I have tried setting bit 10 also, but it doesn't seem to matter if I set it or not.

I am writing to the Crimson FC protocol word called BUS for the speed reference scaled 0 to 16384 = 0 to 100%.

Changes to the speed command seem to only take effect on the rising edge of the run command bit.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks,
Paul

Red Lion Tech Support has confirmed that there is a bug in the Danfoss FC driver. I cannot read or write parameters.

The predefined words still work.

So, I set up gateway blocks to gain control of the VFDs from the Micrologix and now it will allow me to adjust the speed on the fly. I don't know why that is different than what I was doing with the Crimson scripting I was using to manipulate the same data.

So, I am happy to share the details for future followers of this thread.