I tried to setup this clock, seems to work fine. But does it not just poll every storage container at an interval making any everntual OR gate go high every few seconds.
i'm not entirely sure I follow what you're saying there, but in my example, the first chest marked "Zerc" would contain your Zercaner Capsules (feeding into the factory), and a Zercaner Ingot Wedge going back and forth between itself and the Storage clock unit at the bottom.
If, in the course of production, the source of Zercaner Capsules is depleted, the only item in the chest becomes the Zercaner Ingot Wedge. Thus, the chest is empty --on the half of the storage clock pulse where the Zercaner Ingot Wedge is in the storage clock unit at the bottom - of the picture, triggering a "Zercaner supply depleted" indicator light. The chest becomes not empty once the chest pulls that wedge back up, and then empty again when it goes back down.
Using this system to throttle down or off a factory seems possible using latches or flip flops, but i don't know, i don't tend to make factories that complex. I would need a much clearer picture of what it is you're trying to do, it sounds markedly different than what i was envisioning you asking about.
Here's a screenshot of my factory setup, if this helps at all:
capsule source array:
here you see the 8 colors of minerals in ore and crystal.
around the corner to the right you'll see the "drop" chest which feeds the capsule and scrap refineries, and a chest which houses the mesh and crystal composite created from the refinery process. every factory in the setup to follow draws material out of these chests. simultaneously, each chest is wired to every factory in the setup, so all leftover material is recycled into the common draw. checking on available resources is a snap, and i have actually ceased to bother with empty indicator lights myself.
the main factory
the factory is designed to be operated like a console in build mode. on the left there are two assembly lines, with each factory wired both to the material draw and to each factory behind it in the manufacturing process. by re-wiring (using shift+V) the appropriate ratio of enhancers in the arrays (above), you can make advanced or crystal armor with the bare minimum of leftover materials used. the bottom units are 100s, the middle are 200s, and the top are 300s.
items already in this chest are send to the storage array (next image).
the middle red / orange / green light item is a button which disables all running factories by pulsing them with a button, and then the chest below is set to on for one storage tick to clean out any non-production material (i.e. blocks crafted) from all factories in the setup.
it cycles a storage clock once which run the following operations:
red (storage clock hi): button-pulse factories to stop production, send items currently in the chest into storage
orange (storage clock low): pull all non-production materials (i.e.mesh, crystal composite, capsules or paint) out of all factories and into the chest for pickup.
green: sequence complete, waiting for another button press
the three stacked factories are a patchbay for free-form crafting. the enhancer arrays are usually enough for 2-3 people to be working effectively in the factory at the same time, they just need to agree on who is using which enhancer banks.
on the right is a paint "drip" factory. this makes paint at a slow rate, but i just leave it on all the time. all the basic factories draw from this common supply when making colored hull, so i never need to bother with the paint-making step to get up to standard hull, there's always a load of it in there for having been producing 50 paint per tick as long as the base sector is loaded.
the self-sorting storage array
the same button that turns off the factories i mentioned earlier uses a storage clock to pulse each of these chests' draws, taking recently produced items and sorting them into the proper chests. these chests also check one another for any mis-placed items, keeping the entire base's block supply neatly sorted and you'll always know where what you need is.
a user will turn off the factory and collect their blocks, remove what they need from the chest, and send the few surplus blocks (or anything else) to storage by pressing the button a second time.
