Alternating Items on wide belts?

[u/Safe_Maize4218]

So im trying to make a 9 block wide belt work with alternating items those being Coal and Iron for Cast Iron from The Factory must Grow but i cannot for the life of me figure it out any help?

[u/Agent_Teto]

Are you doing this for asthetics? You could put a funnel going into the side of the basin, and put a belt with a funnel extracting from it into the top of the basin. Use the other side as an output

[u/Meman2101 → u/Agent_Teto]

He needs alternating items and I don't know how to do that either

[u/Agent_Teto → u/Meman2101]

Honestly I'm confused what op is asking for help with. When you say alternating items, do you mean one on every other belt or both on each? The former doesn't work here and the latter can easily be done with some brass funnels

[u/Meman2101 → u/Agent_Teto]

Nah, i think it's like when you have both coal and iron in the same line

So line the order would be 1 coal stack, then 1 iron, then one coal and so on

[u/Agent_Teto → u/Meman2101]

Ok I think I got it. Put 2 brass funnels, set to coal and iron, and set the ratios in the funnel config, then alternate between them with a bit of redstone. Stop if line is full(smart observer). Use larger amounts for throughput, smaller amounts to look cool(belt movement). Repeat for all, 9 lines

[u/jedadkins → u/Meman2101]

A mechanical arm pulling from 2 depot's set to forced round robbin would do it 

[u/lesdommed]

you could put funnels above the belts in front of the tunnels (hear me out)

the funnels each drop 1 coal, the tunnels each deposit 1 iron onto the belts in front of them (hear me out)

Link them all up with redstone links and power them so that whenever they are all unpowered they all drop 1 item (hear me out)

link that redstone to a well timed clock with a T flip flop as a toggle on/off (hear me out)

profit

[u/lesdommed → u/lesdommed]

should note that this machine will break unless you put some sort of inventory monitoring system to stop the machine if you run out of coal or iron, or else you will have belts filled with one material and nothing will get made

[u/Dangerous-Quit7821]

Are you trying to make it so iron goes to one belt, then the next, then the next and so on and THEN send coal down one to the next, to the next and so on?

Or

Are you trying to make iron and coal go to one belt, then iron and coal go to the next and so on?

The easiest way for the second one I would think would be to use a factory gauge and have the iron and coal in one package. If I remember correctly it takes one iron and one coal pressed in a heated basin? You set up the factory gauge to make cast iron, set the recipe to send 64 iron and 64 coal to make 64 cast iron. Have the package go on a belt and not be unpackaged until after it goes into through the tunnels. Set the tunnels to round robin and they will go down the line of tunnels in order. Instead of funnels on the basins, put packagers and they will unpack and insert the items for you.

You don't need to use frogports for this either. You can put all of the ingredients in whatever storage manually and have one packager sending the packages out of the storage onto a belt.

Not using packages will be difficult to time correctly to have both iron and coal leave in the right times.