minecraft-java-editionminecraft-redstone
I'm not sure how to do this, but i believe it is possible.
Basically, I want to know how to have a chest system, that when a chest is full, (no matter how many items there are per slot) the hopper will stop trying to fil up as well.
Thanks in advance…
It's because your top hopper is pointed directly into the hopper just below it. Point the hopper on the very top to the side, and it will work as you expect.
With the configuration you have, your second hopper from the top is getting 2 items per "cycle". (The top hopper is pushing one item / cycle into the 2nd hopper. The 2nd hopper is pulling one item / cycle from the top hopper.)
Now, the third hopper can only pull one item / cycle from the second hopper, so the second hopper pushes the "extra" item into the top chest.
I don't believe it is possible to achieve this using only hoppers, at least not without a crap-ton of complicated redstone. However, if you're willing to add in a simple rail system and a chest minecart, you can do it quite easily. Here's the setup:
Place rails on top of your hoppers, and on one end (left in the image) place a powered rail and a redstone torch to power it continuously. On the other side (right in the image) place a detector rail connected to a redstone comparator, which feeds a signal to a redstone repeater and then another powered rail (under the minecart in the image). Place a chest minecart on the powered rail and a button on the block underneath.
Then, when you have a whole lot of a certain block/ore to smelt, place it in the chest minecart and just hit the button. The minecart will bounce back and forth on the track, distributing its load evenly amongst the furnaces and eventually coming to rest back at the start when it is empty. This works because the detector rail and comparator will create a redstone signal whenever a non-empty cart passes over the rail, activating the right-side powered rail and sending the minecart back out.
BONUS: You can further improve this system by placing a hopper chain below your furnaces that automatically pulls out all the smelted results and places them in a chest. It's also possible to add a second track system to feed combustibles into the backs of your furnaces in an evenly distributed manner as well. This screen shot shows one such system I added to the above example:
Note that I had to add an extra row of hoppers to the back side of the furnaces in order to create a separation between the tracks (or else they tended to try and connect to one another).
Best Answer
I have outlined a very general case for vanilla mob grinders and such below from my own experience, but you want a sorting system that detects the item inside and either drops the item in or leaves it out. You would probably want to watch Sethbling's video he did on his automatic sorting system on the mindcrack server. His answer to your problem is better in your case (although I believe it is similar to my own):
A Very General Solution to your problem:
Put a different item that will not be processed in the hopper into each of the spaces of the hopper or chest you are trying to not use. That's a bit unclear, so I'll give an example.
For example, if you were doing a skeleton grinder farm, and you only wanted 2 spaces of chest for bones, you would put two bones in the chest, and fill up the rest of the spaces with a piece of dirt, or something you expect not to go into the chest, like one mossy cobble in all spots you don't want to use. Then go to the one hopper that leads to the chest and fill up all its spaces, but one, with another material that isn't dirt or bones, for example, cobblestone. This is to prevent the cobblestone from going into the chest, and let the hopper pick up only bones. If the skeleton drops anything other than bones, it will not be picked up by the hopper, unless the hopper runs out of bones to process, and then might pick up arrows.
Please leave feedback about this answer in the comment section below. Hope it helps!