Loading hysteresis

[Lubricus]

I come up with a silly contraption to minimize train queue at train station. It is supposed to work similar to the Rimworld crafting hysteresis mod.
You can set an upper limit how full a box should be to stop accepting trains and a lower limit when the station should start calling trains again.
I use 4 boxes and 4 inserters that moves a pistol around and around. With two of the inserters wired to the chest so they the stop and start at different values.
And then the station is wired to the chest where the pistol stops at.


Blueprint: Dont forget to ad the pistol.
https://pastebin.com/7SBRwTA9

[Shokubai]

What is your trigger to open/close the station? Coal Full? Iron Plate Full? etc?

[Lubricus]

In this case iron plates but it could be set to anything. It is the settings on the inserters then the actual station triggers from the pistol.

[Shokubai]

Creative solution. I'm just curious what the extra mechanics are doing that a wire by itself couldn't do?

It looks like maybe you are doing an iron plate between two numbers. Two decider combinators in series would do this as well.

Wire-> plate < X -> Wire-> Plate >X -> Wire -> Station reads signal

But really you could just set the station to Enabled if Iron Plate < Some Number and skip the combinators.

It also looks like you're only reading one chest. If that lane of output is slow you may be hindering the process. I might suggest wiring all chests and using an arithmetic combinator to divide by num of chests so you get an average to work with.

[Lubricus]

Creative solution. I'm just curious what the extra mechanics are doing that a wire by itself couldn't do?

It looks like maybe you are doing an iron plate between two numbers. Two decider combinators in series would do this as well.

Wire-> plate < X -> Wire-> Plate >X -> Wire -> Station reads signal

But really you could just set the station to Enabled if Iron Plate < Some Number and skip the combinators.

It also looks like you're only reading one chest. If that lane of output is slow you may be hindering the process. I might suggest wiring all chests and using an arithmetic combinator to divide by num of chests so you get an average to work with.

I am new to the game so I don't know if any combinator can solve the problem. But it's not only an interval the station is open, the chests also works as an memory. The problem I try to solve is when the station opens and 2 trains come and it's closing after the first train and then the next just drive by. Now I can configure so both the trains will unload then the station will stay closed before there is room in the buffers for two more trains.