Conveyor item sorting

[Harlequin80]

Is there a method of filtering conveyor contents in the same way as liquid or gas?

Is it possible to do using looped bridges like you can the above?

[Lifegrow]

Conveyors don't have valves, so there's no filtering that can be done by the lines themselves.

Using automation (pressure plates, loaders, smart storage) you can have filtered lines - but it's a royal pain  

[Mullematsch]

I don't understand why they added the conveyer shutoff but not the sensors to go with it. 

[KittenIsAGeek]

The ultimate conveyor sorting block:

Spoiler

Materials are deposited with a conveyor chute.  Autosweeper picks up debris and places them in an appropriate conveyor loader.  At the conveyor receptacle, another autosweeper puts the now sorted material into the correct storage bin.  

You're welcome.

[Rhogar]

43 minutes ago, Mullematsch said:

I don't understand why they added the conveyer shutoff but not the sensors to go with it. 

It's useful in ranch automation.  If below a certain critter count save the eggs or else send them to the deep.

[ThoughtAdventur]

If you're willing there is a mod for sorting conveyor contents.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1738906344&searchtext=Filter+

[Gus Smedstad]

It's actually easier than that, if still a bit clumsy.

Terminate the conveyor line in a conveyor receptacle.

Put an autosweeper in range of the receptacle and 2 or more conveyor loaders with the desired filters.

Adding a bin will give you a buffer, but it's not required. You don't need pressure plates either, unless you're doing something like detecting the presence of a single item.

It's not great, and I usually don't do it, but it's a workaround. I do wish for the full range of pipe tools.

[QuQuasar]

A 'standard' filter, akin to gas and liquid filters, (one input, two outputs) can be built in a 3x3 space.

However, if you're thinking of conveyors like pipes, you'll miss their biggest advantage. Conveyor loaders can filter multiple items onto a single line with no additional space or power cost. This means that you can treat conveyors more like a road network, with two lanes of traffic and each type of item choosing which way to turn at each intersection.

A 3-way intersection can be built in a 3x4 space. If you use a chute instead of a receptacle, a 4-way intersection can be built in the same 3x4 space.

The system can be fragile, though. Remember to include a chute at every destination, otherwise items may pile up and cause traffic jams.

[SharraShimada]

3 hours ago, Harlequin80 said:

Is there a method of filtering conveyor contents in the same way as liquid or gas?

Is it possible to do using looped bridges like you can the above?

In fact, there is a mod from our modding-legends here in the forum, "Sensory overload". It adds several sensors, conveyor sensors among them. Combined with the otherwise more or less useless conveyor shutoff, you can make a simple working filter.

[Harlequin80]

Thanks,

I had figured out using the sweeper setup, but ideally wanted to have something that would, for example, just pull coal out of a running conveyor.  

There are only a handful of items I really care about on an ongoing basis, coal, sand, regolith, fossil, metal ore.  The rest can probably be dupe humped for the most part. 

[Gus Smedstad]

Conveyors are pretty expensive because they require ore rather than stone. I’ve only used them where there were permanent, renewable sources of materials, and permanent, ongoing demand. Or, in some cases, permanent sources that were hazardous for some reason to bins.

Historically, I’ve used conveyors to move eggshells, eggs, and meat out of Pacu pools, crops from farms to the grill, dirt from compost piles to farms, fertilizer to farms, cooling metal away from metal volcanoes, fiber and plastic from hydrogen-filled Drecko ranches, and plastic out of a hot polymer press room.

Coal could qualify, but only if you’re using hatches as a significant energy source.

Sand, regolith, fossils, ore all come from mining, which means you don’t know the source, and even the front is constantly moving. It seems like building conveyors to bring that stuff back to where it’s used would be expensive and labor intensive compared to just hauling it by hand. It would be nice to be wrong about that, of course.

In any case, I’ve rarely felt the need to filter. Pacu pools are the main reason to filter - eggs and meat go to the kitchen, polluted dirt to a compost pile, and eggshells to the crusher, and those are usually pretty widely separated.