Filter sorting system help

[acsempronio]

I have a series of chests. Each chest has it's own condenser pumping one item type into it. From here, I will use the chests as a buffer to disseminate materials to different locations to craft different things. The chest is also displayed on a wall so that I (or someone) can access it to obtain that specific material for something not prepared by the factory.

The flow is: condenser -> transposer -> chest -> filter -> [destination]

Sometimes the same material is need by multiple locations For this example I will use iron ingots as the raw item being used to auto-craft circuits and advanced alloys.

Advanced alloys require 3 iron

Circuits require 1 iron.

First I built the advance alloy factory. I had a filter for each material, 3 iron, 3 bronze, and 3 tin. The iron went to a furnace for 3 refined iron. The filter was set to accept and pass 3 iron at a time (3 iron placed in filter 3x3)

This worked fine: the filter spit out 3 iron at a time.

Then I got to work on the circuit factory. I created a branch tube that ran from the iron output to the circuit factory. On the end, I placed a filter with 1 iron. There was also a filter for copper from its source and the same for redstone and resin. My goal was to make several smaller factories that could be placed anywhere and were connected with tubes.

At the iron source, I put 4 iron in its output filter (the one on the chest.) My hope was that the filter would output 4 iron and at the branch, would split where 3 go to the alloy factory and 1 goes to the circuit factory. This did not happen. The filter pumped out 4 which all went to one or the other factory. It was as if the input filters for the factories stopped working.

I attempted to use retrievers to remotely call on the specific number from a bare chest, but it just alternated 1 to one and then 1 to the other.

Does anyone have a solution for this?

Please confine answers to the filter problem and keep non-constructive criticism to a minimum.

Thanks in advance.

[Torezu]

If the tubes are set up correctly, retrievers should do it. Keep in mind that 3 refined iron (and the other materials) actually makes two advanced alloy (after compression).

[acsempronio]

Thanks for the reply. I ended up removing the access chests from the equation to shrink the source building, and then made the source building inert in regards to distribution; all the other factories that produce anything have to call upon the resources which means retrievers. Downside: I'm going to have to make a factory that makes retrievers. Upside: I fixed my problem.

I want the system this way to ensure that I have as little extraneous material holding in the system anywhere. I also started using Item detectors after wait points (like extractors or furnaces or compressors) to trigger non-waiting materials. That way all of the materials for one recipe flow in together.

I couldn't quite make heads or tails of buffers or regulators.

[freakachu]

if you want to get a handle on the some the crazier RP2 tube stuff, direwolf20 has a really great series of tutorials on it. just skip to the later ones where he goes over regulators and all that stuff. it helped me a great deal when I started learning how to use tubes