Factorio Forums

As my first attempt to try and get combinators working I decided to try and set it up so the last furnace in the line of iron furnaces switches over to steel when the belt starts backing up. It also will not strand iron plates in the in or the out of the furnace. It seems to work and I thought I would post it to see if it could be improved. As it is literally my first attempt to actually build something with this, I assume it can. Blue checks the belt to see if there are more than 5 iron on it, the belt doesn't back up entirely, but if one side gets backed up it looks like 5 is a decent count to look for.

Green is the memory cell for the iron plate inserter.

Grey resets the count every 100, just so it remains easy to read.

Red handles making sure that the iron plate inserter only inserts in batches of 5, so no iron gets stuck in the furnace. Is there are better way to do modulo? I'm doing [input/5] as red, [input+4/5] as blue, inserter stays on if blue > red.

I'm using side inserters, which is why the right most filter inserter (that pulls any spare iron out of the output) is oriented the way it is (it dumps into the wooden chest, which the fast inserter on the right puts back on the belt). The other filter inserter removes the steel to the provider chest.

I am not sure I completely understand the concept..
So you want to prevent clogging of the belt by burning everything into steel?
Steel takes 3.5 seconds/iron plate and iron plates take 1,5 seconds/iron ore.
And that is just to male some spare steel now and then?

Why dont you just switch all furnaces to steel now and then, the switch could be a clock with adjustable intervalls.
This way by knowing your desired ratio of steel/iron plate you can simply adjust timing and dont have to worry about your belt overflowing
Also instead of a clock you could use simple counters at the end of the belt.

If you like my concept then just tell me, Ill post my version of your setup

At the time I was somewhat short on steel but had a decent level of iron. Iron is more important though and the demand fluctuated enough that it would sometimes back up and sometimes be a bit short. I figured if it was backed up I would have enough spare that I could shore up my steel shortage and keep more smelters running constantly. Sometimes if would back up long enough for furnaces to turn off.

Honestly, more than anything else though, it was a thing to try using combinators for to make sure I understood the concept. It was also partially inspired by the HypnoBunny's smart furnace setup, he said his setup would sometimes strand iron in furnaces and I figured with the 13.x changes that should be avoidable and I wanted to see if I could do it.

Well now that you can do it I think it is best to make something more usefull

Can you trigger the process by reading the hand contents of the inserter emptying the smelter to the right? (In 0.13 at least). Use some kind of short timer to detect when it can't drop the plates onto the belt for N ticks.

looney wrote:Can you trigger the process by reading the hand contents of the inserter emptying the smelter to the right? (In 0.13 at least). Use some kind of short timer to detect when it can't drop the plates onto the belt for N ticks.

The switch to steel also needs to disable that inserter though, so the iron belt doesn't get polluted with steel. So it would work to start the switch to steel, but wouldn't let it switch back when needed.