[Gate Proposal] Inventory sensor
Rathios opened this issue ยท 3 comments
The first thing that will come to mind is probably why I'm not using Comparators to detect inventory states. They work great for detecting an empty or partially full inventory since all you need is to compare signal strength 0, but as far as I'm aware they have two significant disadvantages: they are not able to compare based only on occupied stack slots, and are an overengineered solution to a simple problem. They can't reliably tell you when a chest has no room for more types of items (chest is "full"), and are analog. (Ugh. Bottom line, you end up relying on BC gates, which I've been trying to avoid. ;) The basic idea is quite simple:
The inventory sensor gate would have one input side and 3 output sides, and 3 inventory comparison modes. The input side faces a block with a valid inventory, while the outputs reflect if the state of this inventory matches the current mode on the gate.
The modes are:
- Inventory empty
- Inventory has free slots
- Inventory has no free slots
The modes can be cycled by shift-right clicking on the gate with a screwdriver.
To keep things simple and avoid duplicating the functionality of the comparator, only stack slots and not stack sizes are compared. Unless, of course, a GUI and a complete solution is desired.
I haven't yet seen anything besides BC gates that does this so elegantly, and it would be quite fitting in a PR circuit. The most legitimate use case I have had for this functionality is a small circuit that will start a system when an inventory is "full" and stop it when empty. It can save you a lot of energy and load in various cases, with energy-demanding AE networks and BC quarries, for example.
I believe that is all~
Tiny referral from IRC chat: if translocators can support external signals circuits can use, they should be able to do the job. :)
