this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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Factorio

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Multi channel radios! (factoriobin.com)
submitted 11 hours ago by maarvin to c/factorio
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So I had a problem. I wanted to be able to broadcast a set of circuit signals representing a list of required items for a given outpost. The problem was that the radio only supports green and red channels leading to N>3 outputs intermixing signals.

Solution: Use a repeating clock that sends a signal only if Z={{my_chosen_channel_num}}. There's some odd stuff going on combinator wise to keep signal values in memory while the Z timer is on a different channel. Also requires a single clock radio blueprint in order to keep receivers and transmitters in-sync with one another.

This is my first time fiddling with circuits more advanced than if X > Y inserter_enabled so if you find a way to make this better LMK

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

In computing this sort of a problem would generally be solved by tagging via packet metadata - wouldn't it be simpler to reserve a portion of the signal for a recipient address for signal decoding?

[–] maarvin 5 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

That would be way easier. I'm a dumb.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

I mean TDMA is also a perfectly valid solution.

Just needs an easier way to synchronize clocks. Maybe one (master) station could send out a sync word that lets all other stations start their clocks.

[–] maarvin 5 points 10 hours ago

The easy solution to clock sync was to only have one clock. There's some funkiness required to TX a signal during the TX's clock cycle due to combinator timing but, I used that to my advantage on the RX side as it now only requires a single frame delay combinator to keep the signal alive 100% of the time.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

I am a dev in my professional life - the number of times I've used that reply to feedback is innumerable (I literally used it on Wednesday in reply to a proposed solution to mitigating replication lag).

Realizing you did a dumb thing is part of the game of life. Now you've finished building one awesome system and can probably refactor it to an even awesomer system!

[–] maarvin 4 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

Woo! Same! I'm working on a bit packing solution ATM. Should be more UPS friendly and more resource friendly :D

I think I was leaning into the clock method as it doesn't have an upper/lower limit to circuit values or number of distinct circuits. Actually as I'm typing this I realized concurrent signals would have to share a 32 bit address space greatly limiting the min/max values. Two channels already limits me to 2^16-1 assuming I want a signed value.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

This reminds me of what elderaxe blueprint does. Not on radar but like wires

[–] maarvin 2 points 10 hours ago

I have that blueprint book but, never actually looked at the core module. If I woulda been able to reverse engineer what the heck is going on there it mighta saved me some headache. Hindsight is a bear

[–] Khanzarate 1 points 8 hours ago

A quick and dirty kind of way is to take the signal you wanna send, run it into the radar, but also run it into a decider combinator set to a number variable.

Like if I wanted to send 30 copper plates to station 4, I send it to a decider combinator that's always true, and has 2 outputs, one that outputs any, so the copper plate signal will pass through, and a second output for the number_4 signal, so number_4 and copper plates have the same value.

Then at station 4, I compare every signal to number_4, and if they're equal, I pass them through.

This has a flaw. Notably, requests with the same value. 30 iron plates to station 3 and 30 copper to station 4 will give each station iron and copper signals.

There's ways to encode a signal that avoid those problems, but this is a very simple one that'll still pull the right output all the time if you work around that limitation.