Handling excess materials with router sorting

[nodar86]

I recently made a sorting system with 2 factorization routers.

***BBB<etc.> | C=input chest
***BBB<etc.> | R=router*
CRRBBB<etc.> | B=barrel
* First router(bandwith, machine filter, ejector) extracting everything from the chest and putting it in the 2nd router
Second router(bandwith, speed, machine filter) putting everything in the barrels

It does quite well, when sorting the stuff I want to sort into the barrels, but I couldn't build any kind of "attachment" to handle the excess items. So that for example cobble, cute cats and diamonds would go into barrels but everything else to a second chest for manual sorting.

I tried to pipe out the "stuck" item from the second router, but even with redstone engine and the speed upgrade in the router sometimes I got items, which had their barrels out of the router before the sorting.
Any ideas to it?

/If you need screenshots I will upload them as soon as I can get to my computer /

 

[SilvasRuin]

You could try Gates. Have one Gate detect when the Router has no more space in its inventory (items aren't being sorted) trigger a Redstone circuit, I think the one I'm thinking of is an RSNOR latch, to start pulling items out of it, then another Gate set to detect when that stack of items is done somehow (this would be the tricky part) and turn the Redstone back off.

 

[nodar86]

Good idea, but what would happen if I only had 56 of the excess item and no more? The first gate would never be triggered

 

[SilvasRuin]

Well then I'm out of ideas.

 

[b0bst3r]

Attach a filter to the side of the router with a very slow timer on it, that filter will pull anything that got stuck in it. It will also pull out items going through it tho hence the slow timer part, say it checks every 5 mins or so.

 

[nodar86]

I would have, but I use the FTB Beta A pack so no redpower :\

 

[DrCeph]

With buildcraft:
Have two chests 'before' the chest that feeds the router, C1 and C2.
C1 is the chest you dump everything into. Have an engine extract items which goes into a diamond pipe. This diamond pipe connects to both your router chest (RC) and C2 (which is your overflow chest). Add the items you sort into barrels in the RC output line for the diamond pipe. The rest will go into C2. If you have lots of barrels, make multiple outputs from the diamond pipe go into the RC.

This way your router will only ever get items it has barrels for.

You can do much the same with redpower filters and/or the sorter. You could also use the retriever for extra style points.

 

[warfighter67]

With buildcraft:
Have two chests 'before' the chest that feeds the router, C1 and C2.
C1 is the chest you dump everything into. Have an engine extract items which goes into a diamond pipe. This diamond pipe connects to both your router chest (RC) and C2 (which is your overflow chest). Add the items you sort into barrels in the RC output line for the diamond pipe. The rest will go into C2. If you have lots of barrels, make multiple outputs from the diamond pipe go into the RC.

This way your router will only ever get items it has barrels for.

You can do much the same with redpower filters and/or the sorter. You could also use the retriever for extra style points.

Not very useful when there are 50 barrels for stuff to go in.

 

[DrCeph]

Not very useful when there are 50 barrels for stuff to go in.

Totally disagree. In fact without redpower it is the best you have.

With a diamond pipe one side is input and one side is the overflow output. This leaves 4 sides you can route to the router chest. Therefore you can filter for 36 different items with a single diamond pipe. Chaining them up means you can filter for those 50 barrels with only 2 diamond pipes. The pain is setting the items in the pipes and setting up your 4 outputs to not feedback into the system.

What I would really love to see though is a router upgrade that ejects items into an adjacent inventory if there are no valid insert targets. Now THAT would be really useful.

 

[thatsIch]

I had a setup which used BC logic gates to detect either long pulses or short pulses (pulse detector)
if you have a very very long pulse you can assume that the router is stuck and therefor you need to pull ALL items out at best so only 1 redstone tick is sufficient.
Worked pretty good, though initial setup space is big if you have then 50 barrells. The bigger your setup gets, the more efficient it is to work with routers.

Tipp: dont use action: redstone or else your router will stop working
use the pipe cables to power your pulse detector and one-tick-pulser