Hi, sry noob question, but is there a way to get either the combinator object itself, or its surface+position to use find_entities_filtered around it?

my use case: i need to measure the ingredients inside an assembling-machine that stands next to the combinator (kinda what Inventory Sensor mod does)

(Many thanks btw, i love this mod already, at first i forbid myself to use it cause it looks way too OP, as a dev, but once you went through all the circuit logic the game has to offer, it becomes a must have to go even further)

Thanks.
It's obviously a bit out of scope of the pure circuit inputs-outputs logic, but yeah, can easily do it by using globals that this mod uses to track these combinators.

Something like this should probably work, storing some (any) nearby assembler in var.machine:

if not (var.machine and var.machine.valid) then
  local mlc = _api.global.combinators[uid].e
  var.machine = mlc.surface.find_entities_filtered{
    position=mlc.position, radius=32, type='assembling-machine' }[1]
  -- can draw circle via LuaRendering at var.machine.position here to highlight picked one
end
if not (var.machine and var.machine.valid)
  then error('Failed to find assembler nearby') end

which means i need to hardcode the combinator UID in the script? can't i retrieve it somehow? i mean, do you expose the UID in any way?

do you expose the UID in any way?

Why yes, in the "uid" variable, as help doc probably mentions somewhere at the top :)

ok i feel dumb, of course it's the very first line xD sorry for having bothered you,
again, thank you very much :) this will rock

Nah, no worries, happens to me with any docs all the time as well.