Shawn Tierney meets up with Jackie Stokes of Siemens to learn how to commission VFDs using StartDrive in this episode of The Automation Podcast.

For any links related to this episode, check out the “Show Notes” located below the video.

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Shawn Tierney (Host): Everybody, thank you for tuning back in. In this episode, I actually meet back up with Jackie Stokes from Siemens to learn how to use a start drive to commission Siemens drive, specifically the g one twenty and the g two twenty. Although, I’m sure some of the other drives are very similar. And this actually came from a request from a viewer who’s who asked that we have somebody on the show us that. And because I’m not the expert, I reached out to Jackie and she agreed to come on.

So I’m looking forward to that. Now we’re gonna cover the g one twenty. The g two twenty, we’re gonna cover how to change Siemens drives to be Ethernet IP instead of PROFINET. They have Ethernet IP built in, which is really cool. And then we’re gonna cover some free training they have coming up.

I will include those links below as well as the links from Jackie below in the description. You should see that on all platforms. And I do wanna reach out to you and ask for a favor. I’m coming up on my ten year anniversary of doing this full time, and I was hoping that you guys could help me out to reach a 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. Now I know a lot of you listen on Apple, a lot listen on Spotify, a lot of you consume the shows over at the automationblog.com, and I appreciate you all.

But I thought, wouldn’t it be great if I could hit a 100,000 subscribers over on YouTube by the end of the year? And maybe if we do, we could have a celebration. We could do a live stream, do some q and a. I’d love to hear what you guys thought over I actually started the channel twelve years ago. I was doing a part time to start, and I’d love to know what your favorite episodes were or what episodes what kind of episodes you like to see in the future.

And so if you guys I know even if you’re on another platform, if you do have a YouTube account, if you could swing by, it’s at insights I a. That’s a lot shorter than insights in automation. So I shortened it up, I think it was a year ago or two years ago. So it’s at insights I a. Again, if you guys are up to it, I’d love to try to hit a 100,000 subscribers by the end of the year to celebrate my tenth year doing this full time.

And with that, let’s go ahead and jump into how to use StarDrive to set up and commission Siemens VFDs like the g one twenty and g two twenty. Jackie, welcome back to the show. I’m so happy to have you back on and here to talk about using, Siemens VFDs inside of TIA portal. Now we’ve talked about your VFDs so many times on the show over the years, and but we’ve never actually, like, put one in TIA portal and tried it out. And I had actually had a a viewer ask about that.

So thank you for agreeing to come back on. And just in case, some of the audience members didn’t watch the previous episodes where you were on, Could you quickly introduce yourself before jumping into our topic for today?

Jackie Stokes (Siemens): Sure. And thanks for having me back on the show. So my name is Jackie Stokes. I am a marketing programs development manager at Siemens. I work in the motion control business unit.

I’ve been in the business for, oh my goodness, I’m getting old, like, fourteen years now. So I but I’ve been with Siemens for about three and a half years. So, yeah, we’ve talked about, our drives family. I think most recently, we talked about the Synamix g two twenty drive with Ivan, one of our product managers. But, yeah, happy to be back and talking about how to integrate our VFDs into portal.

Shawn Tierney (Host): Yeah. And I appreciate that. I mean, you don’t know what you don’t know. And so when we’re going to integrate our first, you know, drive into TIA Portal, it’s kinda like, well, what do we do? And so I wanted to have you on.

I I could have fumbled through it myself, but I’m like, why not just talk to the experts? So let me turn it back to you, and, let’s go ahead and jump in.

Jackie Stokes (Siemens): Yeah. Sure. So, I have just brief slides before we get hands on. I have a demo unit with me, but just wanna cover what we’re talking about. So we’re talking about our general purpose VFD.

It is called SINAMICS g one twenty. So Sinamics is the name of our drive family, and g stands for general purpose. So that’s kind of the decoder ring for Sinamics g one twenty. It does come in a few different flavors. It comes in a modular version version, which we’re using today.

It comes in a compact version, which is g one twenty c, And it also comes in a distributed or on machine version, which is, g one twenty d or a similar drive, g one fifteen d, and that d is for distributed. So the modular version of this drive, comes with a control unit, a power module, as well as an operator interface. So you can kind of see on the pictures to the right, what this looks like. So the control unit can be separated from the power, module, and then the operator interface can be separated from the components as well. So we’re using control unit two forty e Dash two p n dash f, and then we’re using a power module two forty dash two IP 20.

The firmware version, I believe, is the latest. It’s firmware version 4.7 service pack 14 hotfix four. And the software, we are using start drive. StartDrive is our software for commissioning drives, and it’s in TIA Portal. So if you don’t, have a TIA Portal license, to program our PLCs, for instance, StartDrive is free.

So you can download StartDrive and it will open essentially in TIA Portal. It’s just that if you’re using the free version of StartDrive and you don’t have a license for TIA Portal like programming the PLCs, you won’t be able to program a PLC in it, but you will be able to commission your drive. So that’s the little distinction between Start Drive and TIA Portal. There is also a Start Drive Advanced, for advanced features and programming in the drive that you do have to pay for, but, most of what you can do and what we’ll do today, you can do in the free version of StartDrive, and we’ll give you a link to that, how to download StartDrive. And, of course, this is just one way to commission a drive.

You can also commission it with that industrial operator panel, the IOP dash two, which you can see on your screen. We also have a basic version of it, and then we do have a smart access module which generates, a Wi Fi hotspot, and then you can, you know, step away from the drive, connect on your phone. So three different ways to commission that drive. But if you’re a portal user and you’re using a Siemens PLC or maybe you just, you know, want to do this in software, it’s really easy to do as well. So I’m going to give you a brief overview of what we’re doing, so the procedure, and then I’ll jump into the software and show you what we’re doing.

So basically, basic, we’re going to start off with opening TIA Portal, creating a new project, we’ll go online with the drive via accessible devices. This is where we have the opportunity to assign a name and IP address to the drive, and then we will add the drive to the project. So we are going to upload the device as a new station. So once it’s in the project, we’ll go online with the drive. We’re gonna use a commissioning wizard, which is gonna step us through all the parameters and settings that we need to commission the drive.

We’ll do a motor ID and tuning and optimization. And then finally, we’ll just kind of take a look at the parameters and other features that we can see in portal. So with that, I am going to switch screens. So now we are in, my other computer, which we’re gonna use to program the drive. So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna open TIA portal.

I already have it open, but you can see the icon here. We are gonna use TIA Portal v 20, so this is the latest version of Portal. And this is what it looks like when you open Portal. What you wanna do is create a new project. So I’m just gonna hit create a new project.

We’ll call this g column 20. Okay. So if you’ve never seen TIA Portal before, you have a lot of different options, and it can be slightly overwhelming. So I recommend we go to project view, and that’s a good way to just jump into what we need to see, for our commissioning. So the first thing we wanna do so this is what portal looks like.

A lot of different windows, a lot of things going on. At the end, I’ll talk about some free training we have. If you’re unfamiliar with portal and you want to, just see what it looks like and understand all the windows and buttons and how to be efficient in the tool. But for today, I’m just gonna show you the commissioning. So under online access, I’m just gonna expand this on the left hand side.

So this is our project tree. You can see we don’t have any devices here. You could add