Hello everyone, I’m Tom Trinh, Senior Application Engineer with Valin Corporation. Today I’ll demonstrate how to use the Parker Support Tool to test the drive, motor, and cables to ensure everything is working correctly before connecting to the PLC.
In front of me, I have the Parker drive, model PD-04C. Here’s the USB cable connected to my laptop, the encoder cable connected to the motor, and the motor power cable connected to the drive. I’ve also applied AC-power so the drive is powered up. That’s the demo setup.
On my laptop, I’m running the Parker Drive Support Tool to set up and run tests, and on the other side you’ll see video feedback. Let me show you the connection process. I’ll disconnect so you can see it from the beginning. To connect, click this icon, and the tool will display the drive model number—PD-04C. Once you confirm that, you can close the window.
Now let’s set up a point-to-point move so we can graph and analyze it. I’ll configure the target position to 524,288 counts, which equals one revolution. The profile velocity is set to 1,000,000 units per second, and I’ll increase the profile acceleration slightly to make it faster.
Looking at the drive, it’s currently in Run because I turned it on. You can toggle it off and on here. At this point, I’m ready to execute the move. Here we go—it performs one move. Let’s say I want to run 100 moves. Since this is a relative move, the drive will repeat it.
Now let’s capture some data. I’ll graph velocity versus torque. To do that, I’ll click Start to begin collecting data. The sampling time is 20 milliseconds, and the time span is about 199 seconds—roughly 3 minutes. Once the time span is reached, the system overwrites the oldest values in a first-in, first-out process.
That’s how you can use the Parker Drive Support Tool to test. I’ll go ahead and stop the collection and save the data. I’ll save it as a file called scope, overwriting my previous file.
Next, let’s look at the results in Excel. I’ll open the file, and here we go—you can see two columns of data: the first is velocity, and the second is torque feedback.
And that’s how you can test the motor and drive and collect performance data—velocity and torque in this case—using the Parker Drive Support Tool.
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