Looking For Input On How To Change Over A Process

Hi,

I'm working on an automated robot cell. The robots function is to take parts off of an assembly line and store them until the cell which produces the parts stops running for whatever reason. When the cell stops running, the robot starts putting parts on. It essentially acts as a buffer to keep the line full and people who work on the line busy performing secondary assembly procedures. I currently have a BSL instruction set up which tracks the status of 40 bits which represent the 40 physical spots between the offload of the cell and the pick point of the robot. When one integer file fills up, the decimal value is -1. This is the value right after 32767. What I need is a way to tell the robot to change from picking off parts to putting on parts. At minimum, I think I need to monitor around 32 bits. It takes about 10 seconds for the changeover so that the storage automation acts in a FIFO manner and the line moves at about 100mm/s. Does anyone know a good way to monitor these two words and evaluate them?

Thank you!!

How it is done depends on your software, but in general you need to use bitmasks to perform this task. This allows you to evaluate each bit of the words and determine a task based on the value. See this general article on bitwise operators if you aren't familiar with them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitwise_operation