That looks very nice, could you show your warehouse from the inside? ;-)
Edit: Ah-hah! One router can feed the whole barrel wall. I had no idea. I thougt it can only feed/extract from one line of inventories. This is very cool. Is there a maximum range or maximum number of inventories one router can serve?
I haven't run into a limit yet, but a note is that the system will get progressively slower the more you add (Speed Boost Router Upgrade exists for this reason). The limits probably are somewhere around where you might think it's a little insane.
is there maybe a good tutorial for the router + barrel setup?
is there any way to automate it? I tried using barrels with BC pipes
but it isnt working right the way I want cause the _need_ to be feeded from top
Unfortunately that got put up a little ad hoc and with some trial-and-error because not a lot of people play with Routers, but here's a quick rundown of what I did on the initial setup (with some screens). Luckily I included signs with the install and the bits that were added later also got signs. =)
The picture is a basic rundown of how it's setup. The important items for starters are the two routers and the silver chest (why silver? Lots of copper + lots of silver means that's my go-to chest upgrade path for random chests I make). The way it's designed to work is that items to be sorted go into the silver chest. One router pulls a stack of items at a time from the chest and ejects those to a second router that then sends the whole stack off to the barrels. As you can see, I placed them kind of backwards; this is because I wanted the place where items without a valid barrel to be more accessible for people who didn't understand the system; clearing a "jam" because an item doesn't have a good barrel to go to then simply means you open that router and pull out.
The "Extractor" router has a Machine Filter Upgrade, a Bandwidth Upgrade, and an Ejector Upgrade. Machine Filter is set to
Extract from the silver chest (it sees the name as SILVER), it's set to Eject to north (the direction of the other Router in this case; also note that the cardinal directions on the router correspond to the colors you see on their side and that these directions are inverted compared to what you may think they are via Rei's minimap; always check the colors when it doubt!), and I have it pulling from all slots (so it'll run through the entire chest).
The "Sorter" router is set to
Insert into top sides (these are barrels) and to visit all Barrels in the system.
Now, things to make sure of? First off, before you start putting things into the chest, you need to run through all the barrels and make sure each one has an item. Routers send things haphazardly to all valid inventories: this means if you leave barrels empty you run the risk of having those 64 stacks of cobble spread out among all of your barrels! The best advice I can give is to only include the barrels you're going to actually use in your initial system, and to add barrels as you need them. Now, if you want to get fancy and forward-thinking, you can also run and put one of each of various items into the barrels as placeholders for the future; just keep in mind that any of that item that enters the system will evenly distribute between the barrels holding that item.
(Now if you're curious about the "Quarry" chest and the turtle in that configuration, they got added by another server member later to handle our quarry output; the ender chest is keyed to the colors for the ender chests attached to our quarries, and the turtle sits there and sucks things out of the chest and sends "trash" -- dirt, cobble, et al. -- on their way down to a void pipe while the rest ends up sorted in the chest. There are many other ways to do this, this is just the one that we ended up with this go-round).
That's the basics. There are more elegant ways of putting it all together, but I've been lazy and haven't bothered revising the system since it works for us. =)