IC2 Electric Sorting Machine - Can't Extract Items W Pipes?

[Brotuulaan]

I'm playing through Infinity Evolved in expert mode, and I've just hit a point where I need to clean up my base and rearrange some stuff in my main work area. As a part of it, I decided to give the Electric Sorting Machine a try, with a Macerator, Ore Washing Plant, and Thermal Centrifuge around it.

-I want to have the same chest serve as input and output
-The machines are on a 1-thick wall on the edge of a floating platform that I don't want to have stuff hanging out the bottom.
-I'm using Immersive Engineering wires to power everything from behind, so that takes up one side with just power supply.
-I plan on mirroring the setup if I need a second set for any reason (workload, filter limitations, etc).
-This means the right side will be covered up by something else and can't be storage unless I make some other changes to this corner. Maybe I'll have to, but I don't want to.

My trouble is getting all the products and byproducts back out into my chest. The electric sorting machine can't pull items, so the chest can't be adjacent to it and must have something else feeding the items in. That means I can have it sit in front of the thermal centrifuge and have those items auto-ejected into the chest. No problem.

The main products from the other two machines go into the sorting machine and have places to be ejected to. No problem.

But the byproducts that go into the sorting machine don't have an output to another machine, and my chest can't be next to the sorting machine (as mentioned previously, the machine can only eject, not pull from inventories).

And here's the real rub: This pack has ways of push/pull with pipes, but so far I haven't found a pipe that recognizes the sorting machine as an inventory that they can pull from. So how the heck am I supposed to be able to automate the darned thing if I can't extract all the junk from the system?! It's going to get plugged up every five minutes with stone dust and tiny piles of metal dust!

Neither pipe will pull items out of the sorting machine, and it will not eject items into either of them even though the machine recognizes the Extra Utilities Item Node as an inventory.

Above is the washing plant, left is the macerator, and below (behind the chest) is the centrifuge.

 

[Brotuulaan]

I haven't tried using the auto crafting block from Steve's Workshop for transfer yet, mostly because it would be quite ugly and cumbersome here. But if it would work, then at least there's that. But I hate how terrible it would look then. That was part of my reason for rearranging here in the first place.

 

[GamerwithnoGame]

Isn't there a Pulling Upgrade you can make for IC2 machines? And you can set the side by I think right clicking the upgrade on the side of a block? Unless that's only in later versions, I'm not sure.

I didn't know IC2 even HAD a sorting machine, mind you!

 

[Brotuulaan]

There is a pulling upgrade for ic2 machines, but I think the sorting machine takes only one kind of upgrade--and not that one. But I'll look at that again. Yeah, at least the eject upgrade can be set by shift-clicking the side of a block. I would imagine the pull upgrade would be the same.

 

[Brotuulaan]

I imagine it doesn't take a pulling upgrade since other machines are item-specific so as to avoid pulling the wrong sort of item. Since the sorting machine moves anything you want, it doesn't have that built-in safeguard. That would make it more difficult to target needed items with a generic pulling upgrade.

 

[Brotuulaan]

The electric sorting machine indeed does not take the pulling upgrade, but only the transformer upgrade (power usage). As I said before, I'm guessing this is due to most machines taking only specific items, so the machines sort of self-filter; but since this machine doesn't discriminate between items, it needs to be more careful about what comes in so it works the way you want it to and only moves things around if they're injected.

I ended up just adding a chest in front of the electric sorting machine so it spits out anything not filtered into that layer. It's not as clean as I wanted it to be, but at least it only required one more chest rather than a whole reconfiguration.

 

[Brotuulaan]

I'm pretty happy with it now. It still does just about what I wanted it to do, just with a tiny bit more clutter up here. Anything that doesn't go in any filter yet just goes into the chest on top, so I can grab it and stick it in any of the filters that I may want it in. Otherwise, it just sits in the output chest right there, like coal dust.