Factorio Forums

This is related to viewtopic.php?f=80&t=30845 About Cables and Wires / Make Wires Free / Power Poles Contain Cables
That collection is about introduction of a tool for handling all types of cables and wires instead of handling wires as items.

This is a bit different direction: It wants to enable separated handling of the red and green signal wires in all types of entities.
There are for example the requester chest which can be setup for read or for write-access. In read-mode it reads the number of items it should request from the wires. See pic below. In write mode it writes the current content into the wires. How useful would it be to have both (read and write) enabled at the same time?
The same goes with any entity, that has more than one mode (roboports, belts, inserters)...



... may be mentioned a lot more, but is really hard to find cause "red" is too short to be searched ...
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=47706 Circuit network improvement: Multiple modes of operation
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=49278 circuit combinators, set wire-colors for select-windows

We need this
currently if you want to pairwise multiply multiply red cable channels with green cable channels you need 5 combinators.
If you want to pairwise divide red and green cable channels then tough luck cuz it's pretty much impossible

To add urgency to this. Yes, it could be useful to read contents and set requests.

As example consider a setup with a buffer chest connected to a requester chest with some extra combinators. The buffer chest is set to "Set Requests" and the requester chest to "Read Contents" + "Set Request". Whatever request you send to the requester chest would be duplicated to the buffer chest to improve the throughput.

Currently this requires the requester chest to be "Set Request" and a stack inserter to transfer the items into a steel chest so you can "Read Contents". And that glitches because items can arrive faster in the requester than can be transfered and won't be counted until they are transfered.

Not to mention it has been requested several times for combinators. Some computations just aren't possible without it o more than impractical. Dividing red wire by green wire is just one of those.

Being able to both read and set requests on requester chests would be very useful, and there's other entities -- inserters, for example -- where you might not necessarily want their output to be added to an incoming control signal.