Communications with Yaskawa F7

My experience is communicating with Animatics Smart Motors. This is done using VB6 with an MSComm object sending straight ASCII commands over RS232/RS485 com ports. The natural progression of this is incorporating all this ASCII line text into a .dll with functions to handle the mundane.

Now I have 'graduated' to a Yaskawa F7 drive. My only desire is to command set the velocity with open vector, and monitor amps.

Questions: Is there a way to communicate with the F7 in the same way with ASCII text commands? If not, how is it done within VB? What are my options? Are there other controllers that will work with ASCII commands?

Thanks in advance,
Shawn
[email protected]

The Yaskawa drives support a number of communications protocols. I believe these are options though. You will have to check into what is installed in your drive.

The one that would be of use to you would be Modbus. It supports two versions of this - Modbus/RTU (serial) and Modbus/TCP (Ethernet). Ethernet is actually easier to use than RS-232, so that is what I would suggest you look into first.

Modbus is one of the few common open protocols in industry. Lots of devices support it. You can download the specs from http://www.modbus.org/tech.php. You can also find free source code at various places on the internet (e.g. Sourceforge) if you want to look for it.

Yaskawa will have a manual on their web site describing how to use Modbus to read and control the drive features.