There may come a time when you desire to route items between two or more destinations. For example, you could have some ingots stored somewhere and want to be able to route them to your Autolathe or Electronics Printer depending on your current project. You pull out your chutes and find overflows and flip flops but no switches. Eventually, you might remember there's sorters, and you wonder if you can program an IC10 to allow all and disallow all to control the flow of items. You ask yourself if there is a better way, and you find this guide.

The digital flip-flop is the magical chute that will solve our problem. You may know that it allows adjustable ratios between the outputs, such as 1:2, 1:3, 1:4, etc. There's a secret though, the ratio can go down to zero. Using the adjusting wheel on the chute, the ratio can go as low as 0:1. Now items will normally pass straight through, but we can change the mode so that items take the side branch. Unfortunately, as soon as one item passes through the side branch, the mode will change to straight again and be stuck there. Lucky for us, we can write a zero to the SettingOutput variable on the digital flip-flop to get a 0:0 ratio.

With a 0:0 ratio digital flip-flop, the mode will always stay the same and never change automatically. We can now control the path of items by either clicking on the front of the digital flip-flop, or writing to the Mode variable. Viola! A simple digital switch chute achieved.

There's likely to be multiple digital flip-flops you want to set up, so the simplest way I've found is to use a logic memory and a batch writer. Have the batch writer input from the logic memory, set its output to to the digital flip-flops, and set the output var to OutputSetting. Once the batch writer is on, you'll have to set the logic memory to 1 and then back to 0 to create an event to set all the flip-flops to 0. You can then change the output var to Setting and repeat. If you've done it correctly, all the flip-flops will have a 0:0 ratio.

Above is an image of a manufacturing setup. Everything is connected to a chute circle. Using this setup, you can eject from any machine into any other machine. There are also inputs and outputs on the left to allow for adding ingots and outputting produced items.

As an example, say all your ingots are in in the autolathe, but you want to use the electronics printer. You would set the digital flip flop above the electronics printer to input into the electronics printer, and then eject from the autolathe. The ingots would go into the loop then branch off into the electronics printer input. No more hand feeding ingots between machines!