Tooling Carousel

This project was basically a method to hold small items of  tooling in vertical storage to enable a quick way to retrieve the tooling.  Each rack in the Carousel had an optical target that moved as the rack moved up or down.  As the target went past the Optical Sensor a signal was sent to the PLC and the count increased by one.  So as the Carousel moved the count was always increasing until the desired rack was in place.  The operator chose the desired rack for the tooling needed.  The PLC calculated the number of rack counts needed to arrive at the desired rack in the smallest number of moves and also determined the correct direction for the shortest number of rack counts, either going forward or backward to achieve this.