-I always want exactly 100 copper plates in my inventory
-To get this I request 100 plates from the logistic network
-And anything larger than 100 gets trashed with auto trash
Now I want to feed left over copper back into the main bus. If I have a requester chest next to a provider chest this creates an infinite loop where copper gets picked up from the belt and robots move it from the provider to the requester which puts it on the belt again.
Infinite loop, not good!
So we want this specific provider chest not to provide to the requester chest. Solutions with storage chests are bad because they don't filter. I found a way around that by using circuit network:
(Pic is missing an inserter from the steel chest to the belt)
The storage chest can only request copper plates because there are already copper plates in the first stack of the chest and the rest is closed off. The circuit condition prevents the last stack from being emptied because the stack inserter only functions when there is more than x items in the chest. x being the amount of items the inserter can move in one operation (in my case 12).
Problems with this setup:
-robots insert items in the chest very slowly - as slow as the inserter works due to the 1 stack maximum. I have not found a method to ensure at least 1 copper plate remains in all the stacks of a chest.
-you cannot have storage chests for general storage, only specialized storage like this. For instance I'd like items like wood to just be dumped but now i have to make storage chest with circuit conditions for wood linked to a regular steel chest.
Any improvements/ other ideas?
