The revolution in drive configuration & diagnostic tools

Over the past 3-5 years, configuration tools for industrial drives have gone through a revolution similar to what occurred when programmable logic controllers replaced most electro-mechanical relay applications in the 1980's. The technology driving these changes comes from several sources: 1) Virtually all drives today are micro-processor based with large amounts of non-volatile memory. 2) The drives support several different local area networks, allowing remote configuration and control. 3) The proliferation of Windows based industrial control applications, have driven dramatic improvements in the usability of drive configuration tools. This paper details the productivity this revolution has brought to the application of the variable frequency drive (VFD).