I wanted to have a rainbow belt but couldn't find any blueprint that would fit my needs so here is my attempt to build one. It's very much work in progress but basic concept works.
Objective
- Player able to set number of items of each type on the belt
- Belt should be able to accept 6 science pack types
- Belt should be able to deal with unbalanced input
- Belt will never become full
- No inserters allowed for belt input, so that flow of items is more natural, and there is less energy consumption
- Use the least amount of combinators (no more than needed)
- throughput is not a major concern
Red Science only version set to 16 items:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7CRN-BbF00
In similar manner you can add input belts for other science packs.
- Constant Combinator sets maximum number of Red Science allowed on belt
- Counter counts total number of Red Science on the belt
- Barrel acts as a reset signal
- Reset signal triggers Decider to check if number of Red Science is less than allowed
- If true it triggers one-off timer that will pass Red Science half way through the controled input belt tile
- the input tile that is controled must be red (8 ticks) or blue (6 ticks) belt
- this will ensure that every cycle will pass through no more than 2 Red Science units to Rainbow Belt
- if input belt is not balanced it will pass only 1 unit, but that's fine
- in very rare cases input belt can pass 3 or even 4 items, but that is fine because counter will count them and delay next insertion
Thanks to aaargha for giving me idea on improving circuit logic.
Once it's ready I will upload the blueprint.
Let me know what you think and how would you go about it?