Belt Counting - Puzzle

[WhiteFrog]

Greetings

I have read the wiki, the other posts and redit but can't find the answer to my question
Question: How do I set up the combinators to tell me that nothing has travel on the belt?
To count the number of items (easy).
Background: I need to to 1 action if I have not produced any item and as soon as 1 or more items has been produced - do a separate action.
I have tried RS latch and boxes but that is not working as expected.

[astroshak]

Not sure what you are really attempting to do here, but have you tried hooking a memory cell up to the inserters putting stuff on and taking stuff off the belt? For best results, hook the “on” inserters to an arithmetic combinator (Each X1, output Each) and the “off” inserters to another arithmetic combinator (Each X -1, output Each). Then just read that memory cell to see whether anything is on the belt.

That should get you started, I hope.

[mmmPI]

What if you wire the belts to emit 1 GREEN when ANYTHING >0 ? ( Read & Hold )

Then If GREEN != 1 , nothing is on the belts.

[NotRexButCaesar]

Question: How do I set up the combinators to tell me that nothing has travel on the belt?

Background: I need to to 1 action if I have not produced any item and as soon as 1 or more items has been produced - do a separate action.

I would read from the belt as a pulse to a decider combinator.
Wire the output of the combinator back to the input.
Set the conditions to anything ≠ 0, output F with value of 1.

If anything passes over the belt, F will be set to 1 & stay on in the output of the combinator.


Another viable solution that uses no combinators would be an inserter between two chests: wire the inserter to the belt you want to measure, set the enable conditions to anything ≠ 0; place one item in the chest at the back of the inserter.

If something passes over the belt, the inserter will move the item to the output chest, from which you can read a signal with a circuit wire.