I'm considering making a mod with many basic similarities, namely sending items with the circuit network.

My mod would however not require any research (beyond circuit network), energy or special storage chests. So wooden/steel/logistics chests or any modded chest would work as long as it has storage space.

Another big difference is how you route items. All routing in my planned mod is done manually by the player, there is no request functionality. Items are converted to circuit signals which should be routed through the circuit wire, but how you do it is up to the player. There is a dematrializer and a materializer entity pair which send and accept signals and manipulate the contents of any wire connected chests. You can even manually write down the output of the dematerializer and place down a materializer later and manually input the signals to get the items out to the chests connected to the materializer.

The mod will require a lot more combinator knowledge to make an advanced circuit logistics network, but hopefully be at least as rewarding and fun to set up as a rail network and will in many aspects be more similar to trains and belts in gameplay than logistics bots.