I'm using a bunch of ejector hatches on top of an AAI storehouse to send ingredients into a bunch of assembling machines, with the recipe being chosen by a crafting combinator. The crafting combinators have an option called "empty inserter's hands (prevents jamming)", which works really well with normal inserters. The ejector hatches, however, will keep one of the previous ingredients in their item slot, and won't be emptied by the crafting combinator. Whenever the recipe changes, no ingredients are delivered, because the hatch is holding on to one that isn't needed and says "disabled by script"

would it be possible to allow crafting combinators to empty jammed ejectors? or if the hatch on the other side of the ejector requires a different item than the ejector has in it's slot, the ejector should put the current item back if it's on top of a container that has space.

I tried some combinator logic to set a recipe to trick the ejector hatches into emptying, but then i just end up with a bunch of spilled items because the recipe's changed.

The ejector is an inserter with the pickup point on top of itself so codewise I don't see why it wouldn't be able to empty its hand unless disabling the inserter also disabled being able to clear its hand. There isn't a good way to tell what items a hatch "needs" since in a lot of situations it could be multiple things, so I think the best thing to do would be to figure out why it's not able to empty the ejector specifically. I'll have to look at how the crafting combinator works though since I've never used one.

So it looks like the crafting combinator only searches 3 tiles around the assembler it's pointing at. If I place a thrower 2 tiles away from the assembler, the hand will clear. It also seems like the thrower/ejector has to be pointing specifically at the assembler, so using bounce pads won't work. If you're interested, on line 477 in its cc.lua file, it specifies to only search a distance of INSERTER_SEARCH_RADIUS around the assembler.

Then in its config.lua file, on line 39 it specifies

INSERTER_SEARCH_RADIUS = 3.

As far as I can tell, there's no mod setting to change this, so if you want to accommodate for throwers you will have to change it to:

INSERTER_SEARCH_RADIUS = 26

Since the long thrower inserter range is 25 tiles, setting it to 26 should cover everything.