Belts as smart chests

[ske]

Belts as smart chests

Looping belts and item counting

I've been experimenting with a "many items on one looping belt" design. There factories use one belt for input and output for the various items needed for red and green science packs. The problem is to count how many items are on the belt. In order to do this, I've come up with a series of smart chests:

* they have a stack size of 1 each so each chest only contains 1 item type.
* A fast insterter takes items off the belt
* a normal inserter puts them back to the belt.

This accomplishes that a steady stream of each item is placed on the belt (if available). The chests buffer up the overproduction.

In order to avoid things getting flooded, the output of each factory is limited by a smart inserter which stops outputting when the stack in the chests reaches a certain level.

The problem

While this method works reasonably well and is stable, it has a few disadvantages:

* You need one chest per item type.
* You need extra space for the inserters and smart chests.
* You have inserters running all the time.
* You always have many items on the belt due to the speed of the normal inserter taking items out of the smart chests.

Smart chests as solution

These could all be overcome if we could count the number of items on a smart belt. Simply connect a wire to the belt or a new special building and you get the count of all items on that belt (every tile connected forwards and backwards).

Having such a smart belt would also improve ordinary belt setups. Instead of items filling up every belt entirely we could limit the number of items and create a just-in-time-production without the need for roboports.

[ssilk]

I think the direction Factorio will go is about this: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 91&t=14007 Logic Belts (and more)

[ske]

I think the direction Factorio will go is about this: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 91&t=14007 Logic Belts (and more)

Thanks for the link. The counter sounds quite interesting. Not exactly my idea but close enough that it might work.

[ske]

Here, I describe a circular belt factory which would greatly benefit from knowing the count of items on the belts: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =8&t=19609