Factorissimo belt communication

[tzwaan]

Hello everyone

Many of you probably know the factorissimo mod, where one of the drawbacks, of course, is the inability of signals and robots to transfer into or out of a factory.
To solve this problem I made circuit able to request items via a belt and another circuit to receive the request and supply the demanded items.
It's a bit crude, but it certainly works.

The factory with inputs and the requester circuit

The circuit is connected to the factory. Since it is technically a roboport it can send the logistics information.
The constant combinators store the amount of items I want of each in storage.
If there is not enough of a certain item, the filter on the inserter will be set to that item (so it's a max of 5). In the chests there is one of each item. The inserter puts it on the belt, and the signal is send inside.


You can see it's currently requesting solar panels, accumulators and radars.

Inside of the factory

The production for my building materials.

The provider circuit

The circuit detects the item coming in and sets a request of 10 items in the chest. The request will update with each outputted item, so after a delivery the request is removed.



To give the robots some time to transfer the items to the chest, there's a delay in the signal belt to make sure the request is finished before the requester can do another request.

This design is far from perfect. For one, during initial setup it will take a long time to actually fill the logistics system, since it can only request 5 different items x10 at a time. But once it only has to provide the items you're currently using it works quite well. I've been using it succesfully for hours now.

There's also a bit of a problem when there's not enough production of a certain item that's requested. The delivery will not supply the item, so the requester will just keep on sending requests, stacking the amount in the 'delivery queue' to very high amounts. I sort of fixed this by simply checking on the inside if the amount of requests exceeded a certain number, and then resetting the count. Since the count should never really be higher than 10 (maybe 20) this solves the problem quite well.

I could also only return the item to the outside of the factory if the demand for the item was met, but I was lazy setting this up cause I just wanted to have items in the network at the time and didn't really care about the exact numbers that would be there.

If people really want to see all the settings of the circuitry, I could make some screenshots or blueprint strings, but this design is not really that difficult to create, so I think you should be able to recreate something like this yourselves.