Wiring up a counter

[Kalshion]

So I've spent the past couple hours trying to figure out how to wire up a counter that would count the number of iron, copper, steel, coal, and other items in my logistics network so that I would know - at a glance - what I need to increase production of. Right now, I have 19,200 iron plates in the system. I basically want the green to stay on when above 19,000; go to orange when at 13,000 and down to red at 5000 or below.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to figure out how to get it to work. I've looked on factorio prints for blueprints but even those don't seem to work to well.

So my question here is, how does one set up the combinators so as to track these numbers?

[Fel]

If by logistics network, you mean the one handled by roboports then you can just connect a wire to any of the roboports of that network to read the network's informations into the wire.

If you don't, you will want to wire either inserters or belts that act as input and output of your "network" (belt input would be right after the furnaces for example and output would be belts that branch out towards machines if you have a bus).
It's the same principle as when you want to do a sushi belt, multiply the output by -1 then put both into a memory cell (a combinator that does "any + 0 output any" and that has a wire connecting its input to its output).


As for the colours, comparator combinators will do the checks and output a colour and you connect all 3 to a lamp.
You might need to fidle a bit with the conditions to get things right but the easiest would probably be like this.
comparator 1: iron > 19000 output green to 1
comparator 2: iron < 5000 output red to 1
Wire both to the third comparator and to the lamp
comparator 3: red = green output orange to 1
Wire that to the lamp as well.


If I remember correctly, red has a higher priority compared to orange that has a higher priority compared to green, if that's not the case you might need to change things a bit but that's basically the way you go about doing it.
All of this is from memory so I might have made a mistake somewhere, sorry if that's the case.

[Kalshion]

What do you mean by comparator?

[RiO]

Originally posted by Kalshion:

What do you mean by comparator?

The decider combinator.

"Comparator" is originally programming lingo for "comparison operator" - and it crops up in Factorio as a shorter name for decider combinators, which implement comparison operators.

[Kalshion]

Ahh ok, unfortunately, it seems that the high numbers my brother and I would like break the system (for some reason, the arithmetic combinator doesn't want to function)

[Fel]

You would need extreme numbers (at the very least beyond millions) so it's probably either a wiring issue or not setting them up properly.
Don't forget that you can share screenshots, if you open the UI of the combinator in question, move it a bit so it doesn't hide your wiring and mouse over the combinator you give a lot of informations for those that could help.

[Dunhill]

Roboports can tell the circuit network the contents of the logistics network. If you connect a roboport to a power pole, and set it to output logistics contents, you'll be able to see them displayed as signals when hovering your mouse over the power pole. To be able to easily display item numbers, just hook the roboport up to a few lights, the condition of each being your desired item threshold. This is completely optional, but you can attach a constant combinator to each light, using a different colored cable so the signals don't mix, give them a color signal you want and set the lights to use colors. That way you can have a light turn red when iron is low, and have the other lights turn yellow or green when it's higher.