The chest also makes regular requests. So every time you recall robots from roboports by setting a logistic request on the chest, it also fetches robots in storage. This seems to me to not be desireable, but is it intentional?

For now I've made a little hack to the mod that works for my purpose. I've added the following to doRecall:

local signals = recaller.get_merged_signals()
if (signals ~= nil) then
for key, signal in pairs(signals) do
local invertedCount = signal.count * -1
if
string.find(signal.signal.name, 'robot') and myInventory.get_item_count(signal.signal.name) < invertedCount and
myInventory.can_insert({name = signal.signal.name})
then
requests[#requests + 1] = {count = invertedCount, name = signal.signal.name}
end
end
end

So I can send a signal over circuit network as a negative value. Recaller chest will still recall the bots that are signaled, but no real requests will be set on the chest because of the negative value. Would be nice if there was an event that could be interrupted or something, but I'm not too into the api atm to know how or if you can do that.

The idea was to get bots from anywhere it could find them. I could add a separate chest type to help determine where to pull from? Would that solve your issue?

Yes, please?