Ever so slightly off topic

I'm suffering from a bit of memory loss. About 5 years ago I did a service call on a roof flashing cnc press brake. Among other things that were unique on this machine was a drive that alternated between driving two motors, one with an encoder and one without. They swapped motors with a pair of contactors and had an auxiliary contact on one of them to inform the drive which motor parameter set to select.

I don't remember the drive make or model. Does anyone have any idea what drives are capable of this setup?

The machine I'm looking to deploy this on has a 1-1/2hp gearmotor with encoder and a 3hp gearmotor without feedback (limit switch controlled positioning) with an undersized control box I have room for one drive in.

I believe the PF700 has multiple user sets that you do this with, you would need to look at the user manual on how to set this up.

Alan

I think that a good percentage of drives would support this. Perhaps not your bargain basement/entry level drives, but I'd say you should be able to make it work with just about anything from Danfoss/Rockwell/Siemens/ABB/Omron/Yokagawa. I've never had the need to do it and so never really looked into it, but I've seen parameters that look like they do what you're after in a lot of different drive manuals.

If you're going to be using some sort of fieldbus control for the drive, it might also be possible to programatically change drive parameters from the PLC as required as well. Might not be as simple as just two parameter sets and a switch to select them, but might expand your range of possibilities...

PF 755, PF 700, PF 400 Should all do the job. If you can use the same motor but change the operating parameters, then you could also use some lower end drives such as the PF 525, PF 70, PF 40. They don't have "separate parameter set" but you can switch in & out various parameters based on inputs.

ASF is correct, if you can use fieldbus of some kind, then you open up a lot of possibilities.

One small word of caution. Switching parameter sets and making major changes to operating parameters can normally be done only with the drive in a off or disabled state. If by chance you have a drive that will let you do this sort of thing on the fly, use great caution! Crazy things can happen that you would never expect.

Thinking back on it I believe that the drive might have been an ABB. The drive would most definitely be stopped prior to changeover. The small brick PLC the customer wants me to repurpose has limited communication capabilities which is why I am trying to offload some of the drive setup to the drive itself. I will be talking to my local ABB distributor tomorrow to see what he can suggest.