The Design
This is an example of the design; able to split iron plates entering onto the "central bus" from the top left evenly across the five belts going down.
(sorry for low resolution, click on the images to zoom in)
The design can run off of a one-belt thick "central bus", preventing the need of building a massive, inefficient central bus to be able to use the default belt splitters for this. Note that default belt splitters would be unable to split resources 5 ways; not without building a large splitter array going into a 5-belt wide central bus to carry each output. Here the wired belt after each splitter is the part actually balancing the output.
The outputs can be spaced apart further, as far as you would like, so long as their is a wire connection between each output belt. However, each output belt must be side-loaded. It is probably possible to use the full belt, but doing so would be extra complicated.
The main strength of this design is how easily it can be expanded to have more outputs or have more throughput, which I will show later.
The Logic
No robots or advance computing required! everything works off of some red wire and a couple of combinators. I did my best to make this design as cheap as possible, so that it can be used right away in the early game of a factorio playthrough.
Look closely at the red wire setup. It is a repeating pattern for each of the outputs.
This is the setting of the first belt. It is set to read only. Make sure it is set to "Hold".
This is the setting of the combinator. It checks if more than 2 plates are on the first belt, and outputs 1 blue signal if that is true.
This is the setting of the second belt. It only enables itself if their are more than 4 blue signals coming from every combinator (meaning that every combinator must be outputting a blue signal for the belt to be enabled).
This setup ensures that resources only pass through the outputs if each output has a buffer built up of those resources. When any buffer is depleted for one of the outputs, all of the outputs are blocked until that buffer builds up again. This also means that if any output backs-up the rest of the design keeps working!
The Process
This is what it looks like when it works!
The resources are split evenly between all of the outputs, and when the input is stopped, the splitter will halt until the input starts again
Expansion
Adding more outputs to this design is straightforward, simply build an exact copy of one of the output over for the new output, wire it up, and the only change which will be needed is to set the second belt of each ouput to enable only on a signal number equal to the number of outputs, so instead of having the belt enable on more than 4 signals for 5 ouputs, have it enable on more than 5 signals for 6 outputs, or in other words, have the belt enable when the input signal is greater than 'the # of outputs minus 1' (again, so that each combinator has to be outputting a signal before can enable).
To expand the throughput, the easiest way would be to upgrade the speed of the belt and splitters of the "central bus", but another way would be to thicken the "central bus" to a double or quadruple belt and add extra splitters before each output, effectively doubling or quadrupling throughput.
I'm sure their are multiple other uses for this design beyond a balanced central bus, however note that this design is not 100% perfect. Because of uneven belt compression within the outputs, 1 extra plate might slip through for every hundred or so.
Compacting
Here is an updated version of the same design, one which is significantly more compact. Each output takes up a 3x2 area (excluding the combinator, which can be placed anywhere).
Less space is used because their is no longer any side loading of the outputs, and so, as shown above, the combinators must be set to look for more than 5 items on the belt. Everything else is the same.
Also, by setting the combinators' output signals to be the item being balanced, muliple of these splitters can be combined onto the same circuit network without interfering with eachother. I highly recommend doing so.
And finally this output design is easily compadible with the old design, so long as each combinator is set correctly.
Programming
There is a quick addition which can be made to make the design easier change and add onto.
Add a constant combinator like so, outputting 1000 of a blue signal, and the number of outputs for the other signal (set to 5 iron in this example, since the splitter is balancing iron down 5 outputs).
This arithmetic combinator simply processes the information from the constant combinator, set it as above, subtracting from the blue signal the other signal, and outputting the item being balanced onto the circuit network of the splitter itself.
Now that you have those devices in place, all of your output belts will now use this setting, you will no longer need to change all of their settings when you add a new output! new outputs use this setting as well.
When you do add a new output all you need to change is the signal number of the constant combinator to the new number of outputs (so if I were to add another here, I would set the iron signal from 5 to 6), and if you want to completely reset the splitter, you now can by dramatically increasing the number of the blue signal, which will cause all of the outputs to open, and empty the splitter. Return the number to 1000 afterwards.
If set correctly, you can control multiple splitters from just the one constant combinator.
Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=714689792
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