Detecting if a pipe has any contents?

[TLW]

So, it used to be that pipe sensors treated empty pipe as, roughly, a vacuum. 0 germs / 0 temperature / no element.

As such, you could detect "anything in the pipe" with e.g. a thermo sensor set to >0K.

Unfortunately, this was changed so that now pipe sensors (aside from element sensors) retain their last value instead, which means they no longer work for that purpose.

Element sensors work for a pipe that you know will be containing a single element, but don't work for multiple elements. (You can't just use multiple sensors either, as far as I can tell. Consider what happens if the pipe gets backed up such that every sensor has an element it doesn't detect on top of it. The only way I can see to deal with it is... an "anything in the pipe" sensor. Catch-22.)

Is there any equivalent to the old "anything in the pipe" sensor? The only thing I can think of is the same thing we did before sensors, namely vent -> pump, which... uugh. 480W, with a lot of delay on top of it.

Any ideas?

[Lilalaunekuh]

42 minutes ago, TLW said:

You can't just use multiple sensors either, as far as I can tell.

You can

Spoiler

1. Build a loop with one bridge

2. Connect your input pipe using a bridge to the pipe segement right after the ouput of the already build bridge.

=> Now you have a infinite loop

3. Attach your sensors and valves to the loop.

 

 

[TLW]

1 minute ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

You can

I'm missing something. I can't see how an infinite loop helps here.

Either the infinite loop is always full, or it can empty.

If it's always full, you're always getting a signal out, and it's not helpful.

If it can empty... then you're back to square one.

[Lilalaunekuh]

1.If you want to detect if any element is inside your pipe than you got your solution already.

11 minutes ago, TLW said:

If it can empty... then you're back to square one.

The loop should work like a normal pipe segment and all should flow through it. But if your pipe backs up, all gas/liquid packets will turn rounds inside the loop. Giving you a signal that something is inside the pipe.

2. You could use that infinite loop to filter your output and use normal element sensors afterwards ...

 

Could you specify what exatly you want to do ?

 

[ONIfreak]

1 hour ago, TLW said:

So, it used to be that pipe sensors treated empty pipe as, roughly, a vacuum. 0 germs / 0 temperature / no element.

As such, you could detect "anything in the pipe" with e.g. a thermo sensor set to >0K.

Unfortunately, this was changed so that now pipe sensors (aside from element sensors) retain their last value instead, which means they no longer work for that purpose.

Element sensors work for a pipe that you know will be containing a single element, but don't work for multiple elements. (You can't just use multiple sensors either, as far as I can tell. Consider what happens if the pipe gets backed up such that every sensor has an element it doesn't detect on top of it. The only way I can see to deal with it is... an "anything in the pipe" sensor. Catch-22.)

Is there any equivalent to the old "anything in the pipe" sensor? The only thing I can think of is the same thing we did before sensors, namely vent -> pump, which... uugh. 480W, with a lot of delay on top of it.

Any ideas?

"Not" gate? And maybe 2nd sensor to catch things from first one?

[asdf11784]

There might be a simpler way to build something like this, but I think this should work: https://imgur.com/a/6P8V7WY

 

First off, there's a mechanical filter here - this will need to be primed with some kind of gas (it doesn't matter what kind, any will work as long as it's just one type of gas). What's happening here is I have a known gas going in a loop, but the main pipeline will be prioritized over this gas - so as soon as anything enters the actual pipeline, the looping gas will stop going in that loop and go through a different loop which will trigger an element sensor (and you know what type of gas is in the loop so it doesn't matter what's going through the main pipeline).

 

The top valve is set to 1g/s, the other 2 valves are set to 999g/s (since a mechanical filter can only handle 999g/s it might lose small amounts of gas over time in the system until it stops working if you don't use those valves).

 

 

EDIT: Oh, okay, technically this won't detect *every* case - if you happen to be pumping  <=1g/s of the same gas as the one you're using in the loop and the pipe isn't getting blocked up it will fail to detect that.. but that's a very edge case and I can't imagine any situation where that would be something you'd need to be concerned about.