Factorio Forums

I came looking for this with a different use case: mining platforms. Resources are coming in, if space runs out you only want to keep the best ones. Sitting in orbit you don't collect a lot, but if you're moving you can't drop them until you get someplace. Full, have power: upcycling is effectively free. But such a system has to know when it should throw stuff overboard. A slew of combinators (why can't we count total quantity of all qualities??) or a simple check of free space?

+1 to reading the amount of free space from chests.

For supply trains, I want to set train stations to automatically turn off when the chests are full of supplies. I have 48 chests of different items and amounts, and setting up a circuit for determining if all of them are full is very tedious. I have to "read contents" and compare the item counts to a premade list, and any change to what I put in the chests has to be reflected in multiple places. I just want to know if the chests are full or not -- it doesn't need to be so difficult.

And it's not just a convenience thing. I want to try and create a machine which will automatically construct whatever random products are missing (btw, what a shame the "unfulfilled logistics requests" on roboport doesn't report ghosts missing building material). This involves buffering items in chests for efficiency, and what's needed keeps changing. I need a way to start emptying the chest when it's getting too full, and currently that is simply impossible in cases where I can't hardcode what items I expect the chest to contain.

For my needs, one signal which outputs the "space taken" intuitively as a percentage (100 = full) would suffice.