Factorio Forums

Notice that a few posts further is a new version of the connector which is much better than this one.

Version 1.0

I created a circuit that connects red and green wire. They behaves as one contiguous wire afterwards (besides a 3-cycle delay = 0.05 sec).
There is a lot of combinators for a circuit with that simple function. (13 of them!) AFAIK, they all are necessary.

Explanation

I afraid that after 3 hours of creating this I still don't understand my creation well enough to provide an explanation but I'll try anyway.
The circuit is symmetrical so I going to describe propagation of the signal from red to green. The other direction is analogical.
Drawing the circuit state step by step seems to be the only understandable way to do this. That's the how I created the circuit in the first place.

Alternate use

Personally, I use a modified version of this circuit to create red-red connection. The modification causes that one of signals doesn't propagate. It's only one additional combinator which inverts that signal and inputs it to the circuit.

Blueprint String

Or just have a single arithmetic combinator set to "each - 0, output each", with the red wire connected to its input and the green from its output.
All data channels will be passed through it unchanged, with a 1 tick delay.

To split off a single data channel [eg: X], you could use a single combinator set to "X -0, output X". To split multiple channels off, add 1 extra combinator per channel.

Sorry, missed the point on first read. It is bi-directional transfer of data. Pretty sure there is a simpler method, involving just comparing the differences between the red & green wires and normalising them accordingly. But now the idea has intrigued me, must investigate for myself.

Basically, the only problem here is to prevent signal from looping but that's not easy at all. I had tried a few simpler solution but them all failed. In the end, I came to conclusion that the circuit have to have some kind of internal memory because it is impossible to determine which signals originate from which cable only by observing their current state. I'm not able to remove any combinator from my design, but perhaps it is possible to create a different one with less number of combinators.

I can't believe that I didn't think of that before. Well, actually I can. I was able to create the second version after I finally understand how the first one works. You can say that the version 1.0 was a necessary step in my creative process. Thanks for Killcreek2 for inducing me to reconsider the project.
BTW, I'm still pretty proud of the 1.0 version.

Version 2.0

This version is definitely smaller, faster and less impressive. It has only one cycle of delay (~0.016 sec). I still hope that somebody will make use of that. It is simple when you see it but it hard to invent. (Or I am just a blockhead.)

Blueprint strings

You can ask yourself: Why do I need a red-red/gree-green connector while I can just use a normal cable? There are two reasons:
- It introduces a delay which can be useful during building complex combinator circuit. The delay is 1 cycle but the connector can be easily modified to provide any delay or even to have different delays in both directions.
- The connector can be also modified to not pass specific signals. In the example below an 'alien artifact' signal can propagate from right to left but cannot from left to right.