My space platform for Aquilo (and later for the edge of the solar system) has a pair of "trash chute" belts - whatever excess is generated by machines, it gets dumped onto these belts that eventually lead to inserters that chuck it all into space. While this keeps the throughput going, it's not as efficient as it could be and I have to micromanage trips to be mindful of stalls. I currently have each trash belt running by a crusher at the end that recycles oxide asteroids into other types, since they're the most common around Aquilo, but that means metallic and carbon are being chucked into space when I could use them for the same purpose.
So, how would I go about setting up a network that reads the contents of the trash belt as they reach the end, and if it detects any type of asteroid, it changes the crusher to the appropriate recycling recipe - if there's carbon asteroids on the belt, the crusher is set to recycle them, and if there's metallic behind them it changes to recycle them instead.
So it seems there's a kink in the system somewhere. I've no idea how, but the crushers are getting stalled because at some point the recipes for getting resources from asteroids are getting fed into them, and suddenly they have iron ore or ice in their inventory.
Re: Help With a Signal Network Set-up
Posted: Thu Mar 12, 2026 9:02 am
by mmmPI
Sorry for the inconvenience, that's a bad case of failure that didn't occured in my (too) quick tests, i reworked on this here is another version that shouldn't cause the problem :
The idea roughly is to use a belt to generate a pulse signal with the asteroid type, this is sent thru 3 decider combinator in parralel, that transform the asteroid chunk signal into the corresponding reprocessing recipe signal to set the crusher. This transformed signal is meant to be stored in a memory cell during the time of the processing, to avoid rapid switching of receipe and crusher "skipping" some chunks, having them go from input to output in the cancellation. Such memory cell is reset when the processing is finished.
Then there is an additionnal quirk in that the inserter feeding the crusher need to avoid filling the crusher with "many" chunk, in case the recipe changes after just 1, or those extra chunk will also be skipped. This is where i made a mistake in previous version.
Disclaimer : New version require chunks to be "moving" on the belt for the crusher to receive a receipe, because the new signal is emited as a pulse only when they enter the belt, so the blueprint comes with a circular belt, if it gets full and chunks are immobilized, then it will need manual purging to restart.
This can be dealt with by adding a belt of a slower speed just before the belt that is read, and sideloading the circular belt with new asteroids or UNLIKE in blueprint making sure "new" chunks have lower priority to enter the belt, the material backs up in the collector, not on the belts loop, it is not a detail, it is different from previous version to make a more robust system. Unfortunatly it may require a little more room than previous one also because it has additionnal combinator.
It worked fine when i tested in lab setup, but since i haven't used it extensively in game, i'm not 100% confident it works as intended, or if there is a use case i didn't think about that will break it, so does this works better ?
Re: Help With a Signal Network Set-up
Posted: Sat Mar 14, 2026 12:08 am
by DrakeyC
Same problem
Re: Help With a Signal Network Set-up
Posted: Sat Mar 14, 2026 12:15 am
by mmmPI
Do you have an idea when it fail ? because i tested it more in detail last time and it worked fine, i could spot why the first one failed, and the second one uses a different color wire so it has to be something else and i'm not sure what to test anymore.
Could it be low power or part of it was deconstructed ?
At this point i'm suspecting a leftover setting from an older setup, i believe the current one cannot possibly have the crusher receiving a wrong signal due to them being on isolated networks.
maybe show the setup ?
Re: Help With a Signal Network Set-up
Posted: Sat Mar 14, 2026 1:24 am
by DrakeyC
The crushers and deciders are not hooked up to any other part of the platform. I've never had any sort of past circuit network in this area. Here's a blueprint of the set-up I have, the same as yours, just with some stuff repositioned.
DrakeyC wrote: Sat Mar 14, 2026 1:24 am
The crushers and deciders are not hooked up to any other part of the platform. I've never had any sort of past circuit network in this area. Here's a blueprint of the set-up I have, the same as yours, just with some stuff repositioned.
I notice your blueprint isn't the same blueprint as the one i posted, it's not just things repositionned, conditions are different :
DIFFERENt.jpg (483.22 KiB) Viewed 296 times
Re: Help With a Signal Network Set-up
Posted: Mon Mar 16, 2026 10:44 pm
by DrakeyC
Re-did the copy and paste job, still got the crushing recipes going.
This blueprint cannot function because there is no circular belt , and it cannot set the crusher to the wrong receipe either. With only this as information i can't help debug.
