How would you do it?

[Nemesis]

How would you do it?

I have two pure quartz deposits and would like to produce silica and quartz crystals from them, but I have the impression that this cannot be done perfectly without a programmable splitter. Since I can't split it with normal splitters in such a way that both get neither under nor too much quartz.

Do I miss something or how would you do it?

[kLuns]

Either overflow or load balance.
1 constructor of both is exactly 60 items in and out.
Overflow is the easiest method. One side starves while the other one fills up. Once filled up the right quantity will overflow to the starved part.

If you really want to load balance you can make a 75% and 25% belt, then split the 75% into the silica constructor and merge with the other 25% for the crystal constructor.

[Wolfgang]

Assuming you put a MK3 miner on one pure quarz node for silica you clock it down to 472.5/min and build 21 constructors running at 100%. With that you get 787.5 silica/min using the standard recipe. Set up a manifold using smart splitters.
For the quarz crystalls (again, using standard recipe) you can have the miner running at 100% (giving 480 quarz/min) and set up 13 constructors with one running at 80%. That would give you 288 quarz crystalls/min. A manifold using smart splitters with the constructor at 80% being the first one in line should be pretty good here too.
All of that of course changes if you take alt recipes into consideration.

This is how I would do it.

[tdb]

If production is at least equal to consumption, the flows will balance themselves eventually. For example suppose you produce 240/min raw quartz and your quartz crystal production takes 150/min but silica production only takes 90/min. Initially both will get 120/min, but the silica production can't use that much so its input buffers will slowly fill up. Once they're full, the belts will start to back up, and once that reaches the splitter, it will start feeding more to the quartz crystal production.

You can also use more complex splitter/merger patterns to achieve finer control over the rates. If you split the 240/min raw quartz in half, you'll get two belts of 120/min. Split one of those in half again, and then once more, and you have one belt of 120/min, one of 60/min and two of 30/min. Now combine 120+30 and 60+30, and you have one belt of 150/min and one of 90/min, perfect for the quartz crystal and silica production in my example.

Yet another solution is to use over/underclocking to adjust the consumption rates so that they line up better. If you underclock the quartz crystal production to 80% and overclock the silica production to 133.3%, they will both take 120/min raw quartz, exactly half of the 240/min production.

I mostly just ensure that production matches or exceeds consumption and use overclocking to adjust machine counts so they fit nicely in my buildings.

[info]

You can use different speed belts with regular splitters to get all sorts of number combinations (60, 120, 270 ect) then split those belts for even more possibilities (20, 30, 40, 90, 135) then merge together to add up to your total.

Welcome to spaghettiville, personally I would overfeed and dump excess into a sink.