Factorio Forums

Loewchen wrote: ↑

Sat Apr 06, 2024 11:38 am

What it overall does, is to count how many 235 have been put into the centrifuge and once that value reaches 40 it will stop the 235 input inserter until the recipe is finished.
To do this the 235 input inserter pulses its hand contents to a decider combinator memory that has a condition to reset if there is a 238 signal at any point which the 238 output inserter is setup to pulse.

Loewchen wrote: ↑

Sun Apr 07, 2024 10:46 am

The Decider combinator becomes a memory cell by connecting its own output back to its input and using "Output = U235 Input count" the currently stored value is sent every tick to the circuit and read back as input again and any pulsed U235 signal from the input inserter will add up on the circuit, essentially counting how much U235 is in the centrifuge.

The "U238 = 0" condition means the combinator will keep doing this until it sees any U238 signal, which it will see once the recipe has finished and the U238 output inserter empties the U238 from the centrifuge at which point the condition is no longer true and the stored U235 value is reset.

There is one problem with this setup that I found yesterday. There is a tiny delay from the time the U235 input inserter pulses its pickup until the value is added up on the circuit network. This means that when U235 aligns perfectly on the belt (and the belt is fast enough) it can happen that the inserter picks up one more U235 until it sees the 40 value and stops. So the centrifuges will overfed over time. This can be prevented completely by either using yellow belt on the input side (which for my setups is not a bottleneck and if it is you can split the setup into two parallel lanes) or setting the inserter capacity to 1 (don't do that)