bot based smelting

[golden needle]

hello everyone,

I use a bot based smelting setup where I have furnace arrays placed beside rails with requester and passive providers, and trains come to unload their raw ore, then stop at another station to load the smelted ore, which is brought to requester chests from the passive provider chests that were loaded from the furnaces using inserters.

Now I have a question, how can I have it so the loading of the iron is balanced on each wagon of the train, like if a train brings in 8k ore, each wagon with 2k, how after all the ore processing can I have it so the train ends up with 2k iron in each wagon? because I can't seem to balance the requested iron for each requester chests.

Should I just ditch the idea of using bot based smelting or is there a solution?

Thanks.

[hollow rune]

If you separated the trains into those delivering ore and those taking plates then this will not be an issue as the requester chests will slowly fill up and the requesters are fairly balanced as is.

You could aim to fill the trains to 39 slots of ore, using counting circuits per wagon and active providers to discard any overshoot in the last slot. This logic is similar to how one setups up LTN logistic stations.

You could dump the items onto a belt and then use a regular belt balancer to send it for loading.

A final idea I thought of is you could ignore the issue and order the trains to depart of X inactivity time. As long as the stations unloading the iron plate are either bot stations, or have a belt balancer, then any imbalance will not matter and eventually the system will enter equilibrium and work as you want.