SmartFurnance (4 Kind), Bots only, Circuits pew pew

[Kosh]

Hey

I'll show you a potentially new idea of a 4 kind SmartFurnance managed only by bots.
Factorio is in vanilla.

Idea
Use of SmartFurnance in priority order of ores. No double occupancy for a single furnance.

Beginning
I saw a SmartFurnance tutorial on Negative Root's youtube channel. This video let my think to rebuild it in a way, that the double/tripple use of a furnance at the same time should never happen.
Reading into brought me to the first ideas of MeduSalem, rk84 and xnmo. Thanks guys for your concepts and ideas. Forum history https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 9&start=10

Overview
Explanations to the pictures are below the screenshots.


A overview of my furnances. Details to the diffrent areas follows.


Here comes the magic. With the power of circuits (red/green wires, deciders, ..) it sets each furnance row a specific material to produce.
The lights are indicator for the full vertical furnance row. If the light is shining then look to the left (green box) and you see which kind of material it's producing.
If a row has no lamp actived, then all furnances in this row are idle.


How it works
--- A) Players settings ---

in the Players settings you are able to set the quantity of furnance rows that should running for a specific typ. You set this by the amount of plates in your logical storage.

As less material are in storage as more "Science pack" go inside passive providers that follows by furnance rows are going active to produce this kind of material.
Red wire connections: all top Smart Inserters -> all Passive Provider chests -> Decider combinator -> Electric Pole --> ... to the Calculation area.
Click on the link to see pictures, how to set up the Smart Inserters and Decider. http://imgur.com/a/LY9Ip

--- B) Calculation area ---

So, we have now the signals that says we have to activate 2 full rows of iron (blue Science Pack) and 1 full row of copper (red Science Pack)


First we split the signal with Arthimetic combinators. Now I get just that output for iron.


For the 2nd row (Copper) I need all iron rows + all copper rows.
For the 3th row (Steel) I need all iron rows + copper rows + steel rows.
4th row the same for (Stone). Just add it to the already occupied furnance rows.


Set up the combinators (arthimetic and deciders) inside the iron part is like this schema (always using three combinators for each furnance row)
1. Look in the first Decider if iron signal is bigger then 0. -> If yes, give out static 1.
2. Arthimetic reduces the iron signal by -1
3. The 2nd Decider (below the lamp) looks for how many "1" it gets. -> If exactly 1 then it produces this material in this furnance row. It is more then one "1" then another material uses this furnance row.
Here are some pictures to see the exact programming inside the combinators. http://imgur.com/a/Bdesj

For the other materials it's the same. Because iron already uses furnance row 1 and 2, both give a signal "1" to the copper row. And because the copper signal is bigger then "1" in the very left it get another "1". So the copper get his own furnance row just after the busy furnance rows from iron. (With the pictures probally you get the idea of how it works)

--- C) Smart Furnances ---

All Smart Inserters inside the Smart Furnances part are connected with red wires to the Calculation part, but just to the three combinators they're below the furnance row. (just vertical lines, no horizontal connections).
Every Smart Inserter gets a couple of signals. (blue for iron, red for copper, green for steal, purple for stone). But every furnance row has not more then 1 signal with a "1".


So I can activate the furnances by feeding it from the correct chest. All Smart Inserters are checking for the "1" in his own signal. As example, copper's Smart Inserter checks for the red signal within a one.


You can see the modul part that you could blueprinted and multiple copy to increase the size of your furnances. Also the cool thing is that red wires / green wires don't need resources by blueprints. (Robots create them without wires in the logic storage)


Conclusion
Still an advanced factory, but was a lot of fun to build it. Specially because I learned a lot about combinators / circuits. (And probally here you could see the advantage of circuits)
Maybe the other discussions about feeding a furnance not fully with raw materials and then be blocked for other resources is not fixed with this concept. But at least you don't have overlapping by the furnances.

Let me know if it's useful or share your opinion.
Thanks (sry for long post).
Christoph

--
Savegame is attached here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cdle0hhejpoo9 ... a.zip?dl=0

[MeduSalem]

I always wanted to integrate some circuit logic into the smart furnaces ever since 0.12, but didn't get to do it for various reasons...



How do you solve the problem of Steel requiring 5 Iron Plates and Stone Bricks requiring 2 Stone?

Because if the circuit logic switches an entire row off due meeting the set amount in the logical storage it might be that the logic switches off exactly while there is only 1-4 Iron Plates inside a furnace or an odd number of stone, both cases leading to a deadlock of the furnace which can only be solved with manual intervention.



That one can't specifically set the inserter stack size bonus anywhere between 1 and 5 individually for each inserter, depending on research level, is just a major drawback when using a bot-only setup for Smart Furnances. If one could change that individually for each Inserter then the problem with Steel/Stone Bricks would be gone.

We had that discussion quite often already when talking about Smart Furnaces and also in the Ideas/Suggestion section when talking about additional inserter options, but since the devs prefer simplicity the conclusion was that they will never provide additional options to inserters, like chosing a stack size bonus different from the global one, or limiting rotation angles and other such things that would render some mods obsolete.



The only way I managed to safely get Steel/Stone under control was with a setup not using any bots. Rather I used belts instead, where I had exact control over how many items I put inside the chest before inserting it into the furnace:

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 275#p82275

Which also required some advanced belt/storage management and Circuit Logic to monitor how many resources there are on the belts to prevent any clogging and to achieve a balanced distribution between all 4 item types. But at least it couldn't get stuck because of the wrong amount of source materials being inserted in the furnaces.

The only drawback was that Steel/Stone throughput is not really as good as Iron/Copper Plates, due to the resources for Steel/Stone being counted one by one. It is a tradeoff for safety reasons.

[Kosh]

How do you solve the problem of Steel requiring 5 Iron Plates and Stone Bricks requiring 2 Stone?

I didn't solved this problem. I get the same deadlocks.
With the circuits I wanted to show another concept of running SmartFurnance. Instead of using furnance row 1 to x for iron in increasing order and using furnance row x to 1 for copper in decreasing order.
I get rid off the furnance rows they're twice occupied by two diffrent ores. If more then 50% of the furnances have to produce iron and copper.

But I see. If I can't handle the inputs in a way that they're burned fully it's useless to have the furnances programmed to a kind of material.

Let me think a bit about and probally I could give you an other solution that takes responsibility of the inputs.