Assembly Machines should emit combinator values

[Andir]

Hooking a wire up to a assembly machine should emit a value for each item it contains in its inventory.

Let's say that you have an iron gear wheel assembly machine. You connect a wire and it emits "0 iron plate, 0 iron gear wheel". If I feed it 2 plates it will emit "2 iron plate, 0 iron gear wheel" while it begins the manufacture process. When done making the gear wheel it will emit "0 iron plate, 1 iron gear wheel". This way we can do simple math on a series of connected assemblers to determine supply/demand. It also allows us to hook up smart inserters to only feed if iron plates < 2 (or 4, 6... if we want a bit of cache built up).

This essentially makes assemblers a variable combinator that emits their product which we can wire together to make smarter lines.

Edit: proper names...

[bobingabout]

I am fairly sure that this is already in the works for the next major release (0.13.x series).

[Andir]

Ugh... waiting for 0.13 is killing me!!

[Nicksaurus]

I am fairly sure that this is already in the works for the next major release (0.13.x series).

This release is going to be so good...

[Andir]

I'm sorry if necroing a post is frowned upon, but I tried doing this again in 0.15.2 and it's still not an option to hook a wire up to the assembly machine.

Though after reading my previous request, I think it would be beneficial to implement it more like the roboport where multiple signals are dispatched or a "mode" could be selected to output the required material, items waiting to be removed, and/or a state of it's processing (0 = idle, 1 = processing)

[Tekky]

Yes, I also miss this feature a lot. Right now, I have to always count the number of items entering the assembler and leaving it again, in order to determine its current state and inventory. This requires a rather complex combinator setup. It would be more meaningful if it were possible to simply hook up the assembler to the circuit network.

[Philip017]

+1 to hook all assemblers, chem plants, centrifuge ect to the circuit network to output their contents

[The Eriksonn]

+1
and also turn on/off
I dont Think the change recepie mode will work that well, it was discussed in some other post that i dont remember

[nemostein]

Not being able to read contents from Assembling Machines bugged me a lot in the beginning, but I grew used to it and noticed that you don't need this information on most cases.
It'd be really nice to have such feature, though...