well...
I've never used any software (thanks for the tip, though)... I just have a couple of HIMs that came with some of the drives, and I slap one in to set it up.
No special interface required for an HIM- there's a cable in the faceplate that connects to the mainboard, and the HIM slides into it.
For external DB, I just stick a pair of wirewounds on the machine and wire 'em in parallel. Can't remember what I used OTH, but it was either a pair of 50-ohm or 100-ohm... nothing critical. On a whim, I used a 500w floodlight once... kinda funny.
I don't bother shipping transformers... I usually TRIP on 'em... walking through junkyards. Most people don't recognize what they are, and scrapyards don't put a very high value on 'em for scrap. I was wandering through a scrap yard with a buddy last year, and found a pile of about 20 in the 3kva range, carried 4 of 'em out for $5 each. Would'a bought more, but we found a few other things... a Yaesu FL2100B, some breaker-panels from an F4 Phantom, a handful of s-type 1500lb load-cells, and two linear actuators from some kind of aircraft. You KNOW you're at the right junkyard when there's a half-parted-out helicopter sitting in the front driveway.
My local yard here seems to often end up with lots of food-grade scrap... there's washdown motors with stainless-steel worm-reduction drives on torched-up conveyors, plenty of control boxes loaded with contactors pushbuttons 'n stuff. Most of the transformers are either control-level, or 7+kva, and frankly, they're cheap enough that a feller could install one in his shop, and just pipe 480v single-phase to every machine... just bring a hand-dolly...
And FWIW- it may seem so, but I really don't have any allegiance to A-B... only reason why I mention 'em, is because I got some cheap, defeated the learning curve (which appears to be one of the most painful things of ANY VFD), and got 'em to do what I needed... and then, once I did, I wrote it all down, so I could do it again without giving up 3 years of my life to re-figure-it-out. To their merit, they're cheap to buy used, usually work, and perform reasonably for the circumstances. The external housings for the 'smaller' drives are rather fragile, and there ain't much space to work in the heavy-gauge wiring vicinity... so duct-tape is a common repair tool. I can't substantially compare performance to other current drives because I can't justify the expense of more recent technology, but obviously the sources from which I obtained my A-B's felt the newer competitors were better suited for their applications, and that's why there's so many used drives on the market for-dirt-cheap. From an industrial standpoint, I'm sure there's better stuff available, particularly now. It isn't, however, readily available to me for under $100 a machine.
