Silly challenge: 4-way "diffuser"

[Tinyboss]

So I had this idea for a modular factory, a grid of disconnected roboports, with belts running between them. Each square would take what it needs from the belts, and put back what it produces. I wouldn't even try to send anything to a particular place, but rather just let it "diffuse" throughout the grid. Each 4-way intersection would have an input and an output belt, and each input needs to be split evenly among all four outputs. It should also be lane-balanced, so that an equal number of items are sent to the right and left lane of each output belt.

Yes, this is essentially a 4-4 belt balancer with a funky input/output arrangement (and also lane-balanced). But of course it should have symmetry, so I didn't want to use one of those designs with some ugly belt re-routing. Here's the best I came up with. I'm sure someone can do better.

Note, I don't think this factory paradigm or this particular "diffuser" design will actually be useful for anything. It just turned into a nice puzzle.

[Zhab]

Here is a link to a very old youtube video. It talk about a "belt chain" concept that do exactly what you want in a much more compact format. Might be worth checking out.

https://youtu.be/EEvVFkzTtWY?t=6m15s

[bigyihsuan]

Any videos of it in action?

[Gus_Smedstad]

If I understand what you want to do, you want there to be sort of a global recirculating pool of items on the belts, and when a module produces something, it goes into that pool. While it's not relevant to your specific question - the diffuser at intersections - that thing that occurs to me first is that you need to use splitters to evenly mix module outputs into the stream. If a module waits for space on the bus, there might never be any space. If a module puts it output on the bus before passing on inputs, raw material modules will flood the bus with nothing but ore, holding back any finished products. So it needs to be half and half.

I fully expect the results to be really terrible, with most modules spending 95% of their time idling, hoping for the right materials to drift by.

[deemer]

Here's my solution: I think for proper output balancing you need three splitters each way, so there is a minimum 8x8 size for the middle, and the whole thing is 12x12 including the splitters.

diffuser1.png (761.47 KiB) Viewed 10696 times