Touch Panel to control VFD with Modbus... PLC required?

[toygasm4u]

Subject line kind of spells it out; I'd like to put some GUI to a VFD application, but I don't know if I like the idea of needing a PLC in the loop. I'm a RS-485 / ASCII / Modbus virgin; having a hard time figuring out where I need to start.

I've looked at a few panels on Automation Direct; they support RS-485, but I'm unclear as to if they can operate as an RTU master. I've also gathered that I'm going to need to put together some sort of look up table to cross reference drive functions to data strings...

Any advice?

 

[dV8r]

You can do this, no problem. The HMI is the Modbus Master and the drives are slaves or nodes. I do not know about The AD but Red Lion or GE Fanuc's QuickPanels work great for this. No PLC needed.