Factorio Conveyor Belt Music Box

Playing a random MIDI arrange of Misirlou by Dick Dale (it happened to match the tempo of express conveyor belts and was the first idea that popped to mind).

When I found out that conveyor belts emit pulses when items enter them, and that there were programmable speakers, I knew I had to do this.

Some info about how this works and how it was made:

Each speaker plays one pitch of one instrument; not very clever, but it's simple and allows different pitches and different instruments to play simultaneously.

Instruments are grouped by column; they have different ranges, hence the different positions and column sizes.

Each material represents a different note; for example, "copper cable" is "strings".

The conveyor belts are set to "pulse" mode, so they emit a signal when an item enters.

Since each conveyor belt has two lanes, two instruments can play the same note at the same time. Which is enough most of the time (it was for this song).

The "notes" were generated from a MIDI file. I wrote a Python script to read the MIDI and generate Lua code to place items on the conveyors, which I pasted into the console. An example of an individual command is:

game.player.surface.find_entity("express-transport-belt", {490, -239}).get_transport_line(2).insert_at_back({name="copper-cable"});

Most other parts of this construction were placed with the help of Lua scripts. You can get to the console with "~", and the API is documented relatively well here: http://lua-api.factorio.com/

I also used the Creative Mode mod for convenience: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Moonca...