Add circuit connectivity to Labs

[Inlaudable]

TL;DR

Give us the ability to connect circuits to labs in order to send their contents to the network.

What ?

Treat labs like chests for the purposes of circuit connections, allowing the network to read the contents of the lab.

It would also be nice to be able to turn the labs on and off, like circuits can do for inserters and other objects.

Why ?

This would allow all the labs to be connected, and allow the user to see a total number of science packs in all of the labs, without having to count.

This could also highlight issues in very large lab setups that might be hard to pick out. Uneven pack counts from the labs would indicate a supply issue.

Turning the labs on and off conditionally via the circuit could potentially allow users to eliminate inefficiencies with large daisy-chains of labs.

Also, I want a synced-up field of labs, because that would look awesome, and I think this would allow me to do that more easily.

[jamiechi1]

Would the Inventory Sensor mod work for this?

[ssilk]

Until now the behavior of labs can be controlled by controlling the inserters.

Turning the labs off is simply by turning the inserters off. Or the power (which also reduces standby power).

And the use case of knowing what’s in the labs doesn’t help much. If you have an array with labs you can have the case, that all ingredients are available, but no lab is working, because the ingredients are splittend into the labs. So you think they work, but the truth is that you miss one or more items.

No, if you want to know how good they work you need to measure the items, that are transported into them. Just look at the consumption of the ingredients in the production window.