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Balanced belt/lane/chest Unloading Station System

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Balanced belt/lane/chest Unloading Station System

Posted: Wed Nov 14, 2018 7:05 am
by NeoVortex
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How it works: inserters take items from the wagons only if there's enough space to completely unload all the wagons. Inserter's stack size are set to 10, so all of them pick the same ammount of items when the wagon is almost empty. Moreover, they work synchronized using a clock signal. There're a 8x8 balancer and 2 4x4 lane balancer. As a result, the chests will remain balanced, differing by 12 items max (stack size), no matter how the 8 belts are consumed. The incoming trains must have all their wagons equally loaded and with items multiples of 10. I made a test blueprint if you guys want to test or improve it. Feedbacks are welcome. Please don't talk about throughput, that's not the point.

Re: Balanced belt/lane/chest Unloading Station System

Posted: Wed Nov 14, 2018 9:36 am
by hansjoachim
NeoVortex wrote: The incoming trains must have all their wagons equally loaded and with items multiples of 10.
Why not make a balancer where that isn't a requirement?


Its hard not to mention throughput as you only get 8 belts out of 8 wagons, which makes it unpractical and just a proof of concept.

Re: Balanced belt/lane/chest Unloading Station System

Posted: Wed Nov 14, 2018 9:56 am
by eradicator
I've built a guaranteed-equal unloader before in an older thread feel free to have a look. It doesn't care for item stack sizes, and does more than 3 blue belts per wagon side, i.e. it unloads faster than you can bring in new trains. Uses bots though.

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Re: Balanced belt/lane/chest Unloading Station System

Posted: Wed Nov 14, 2018 2:18 pm
by NeoVortex
Thanks for replying, eradicator. I tested your solution and it is indeed very clever. Do you have a belt-based unloading blueprint?

Re: Balanced belt/lane/chest Unloading Station System

Posted: Wed Nov 14, 2018 2:41 pm
by eradicator
NeoVortex wrote: Wed Nov 14, 2018 2:18 pm Thanks for replying, eradicator. I tested your solution and it is indeed very clever. Do you have a belt-based unloading blueprint?
No, but nothing stops you from using inserters instead of bots to unload the passive provider chests. Refer to this other lengthy thread for how to quickly unload from chest to belt.

Note that there are two stages for unloading:
A) train to (provider) chest
B) (provider) chest to belt.

The bot based solution balances both steps for the whole train. But without bots you won't be able to balance B, even though A will work fine. I.e. without bots a slow output belt block will slow down the unloading of the whole train instead of balancing towards the other output belt blocks.

Also note that both linked threads are about experimental solutions, so nobody has done any real-map testing with them ;p.
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