Automated bot refiller for outposts

[PyroFire]

Took me a bit, but i've made a thing with combinators that periodically counts and re-fills the bots in the system.
Very useful for outposts as they only need a limited number of bots and one roboport.
Although it means there's no bots for about 30 seconds, i don't see that as really a problem.

[MeduSalem]

Nice... and I thought it was undoable when I tried to implement something like that past autumn.

Hopefully we will get Circuit network connections to roboports though... so roboports can output the current number of Bots to the circuit network for refilling purposes, which would make things a lot easier.

[Xterminator]

Nice! That's super cool. Wish I knew Combinators well enough to do stuff like this. Lol

[MeduSalem]

Wish I knew Combinators well enough to do stuff like this. Lol

Me too.

I am fine with some basic stuff like creating Oil Processing priorities... but most of the other stuff is just too complicated because I don't like the way one has to implement boolean operations with weird workarounds using arithmetic combinators+deciders. I find it rather inconvenient when it is not like "what I see is what I get" when it comes to logic operations.

I would rather have "AND", "OR", etc being an actual operator between two channels/values and then output the result to another channel of your choice if true. It seems so much easier if it just were like that because then I would at least be knowing what I am doing. If I just want to check if there are both Iron ore AND Copper ore currently I have to use 3 damn combinators or whatever to do that. Why can't it be ONE operation inside the Combinator or Item I want to control?

Also I find some of the practical stuff that lacked before Combinators were a thing still lacking. Like for example implementing a "less than or equal to" (≤) or "greater than or equal to" (≥) is still a chore in my opinion.

I need like 1-2 combinators or whatever to implement these because I can't set the comparison directly inside an Inserter. I know that it can be done with combinators but that I need them for such an easy operation is what's the dealbreaker for me. Using the "<value> -1 " trick within the inserter itself doesn't always work because what if I want to compare if Iron Ore is less or equal to Copper Ore? The "<value> -1" trick doesn't help then. It also doesn't work if you want to check if something is greater or equal to 0 because you can't set "greater than -1" inside the fields. Combinators take a lot of space and usually there is none because the space is crammed with assemblers/furnaces/inserters/chests/belts.

Also there is no "unequal" (≠), which means if you want to check if a value is for example unequal 10 you can't do it in one step. You would have to use combinators to check if the value is greater or less than 10.

So on the long run some people might have their fun with the complexity the Combinators allow in "do it yourself" fashion, but if I don't even have the most basic functions I will leave it at practical solutions that are actually necessary in my factory, like Oil Priority management.

[Mad Inventor]

Very nice!
Can you explain how you made it work? I can guess some ways, but I can't figure it out from the picture without seeing the settings, or even the wires very clearly.
You have a combinator timer to start and stop the counting, and this is how the bots are counted -
You take ALL the bots out of the port, and put them in the top right chest (from the four on the bottom) to count, then add bots up to the desired numbers (from bottom right chest) and put them back?
In either case I'm assuming you use the extra chests on the bottom to get an exact count by putting in the robots and only taking them out once you've reached the desired number, at the same time stopping the inserters from putting any more in. You're using either the top-right or bottom-left chest for logistic bots and the other for construction bots so you can control them separately with filtered inserters, then putting them all in the top left chest with the fast inserter to put them back in.
Or, are you taking the bots out of the port and always replacing them with the same number of backup bots that are waiting as a "second shift"?
In either case the bots would replace the supply of backup bots, I assume that's why you have the requester chest.
If I've figured this right, though, I don't understand why you also have an inserter from the roboport to a provider chest in the very top.
Is this on the right track at all? I'm going to try it the way I described later today, but maybe you have something different.