Mariculture crucible automation... I am using the mariculture crucible for automating all my ores.. Not the best ratio of ores to ingots, but when you are essentially dealing with unlimited resources, I decided that compact would be the best solutions.
I dedicate each ore to its own crucible. I am using BC pipes and gates to automate it. Directly below each crucible is an autoassembler that is creating the ores from essences. The ores are fed as needed to keep about a stack and a half in the crucible at all times since the crucible can smelt both inputs at once. On top the auto assembler is a wooden extraction pipe, followed by a gold pipe to speed up transfer and then quartz the rest of the way up to the crucible.
A golden AND gate reads the specific ore item in the crucible and sends a red pipe signal when that drops below 75%. The pulsating gate down below on the extraction pipe is activated on a red pipe signal.
This is the same for all the for almost all the ores..
All except for iron. Smelting iron ore in the crucible generates unknown ironic dust. I didn't have any extra space I could use for the piping, and I was trying to keep everything nice and compact. This was my solution to the problem.
I am using the same pipe for both the extraction of the ironic dust and the insertion of the ores. I am using a filter and lens on the pipe segments to get this done. As ores come up, they are blocked from entering down the alternate path by the red filter (Lowest pipe segment you can see). The clay insertion pipe (you could also use diamond) makes sure that the ores go into the crucible. The wooden extraction pipe pulls out the ironic dust when it is present. The dust can't reenter the crucible, so the insertion pipes passes it down and it passes through the red lens inline. Since it now colored red, the red filter pulls the ironic dust down the alternate path. I am using a gold OR pulsating gate in this case so I can activate on either trigger independent of the other.
I'm sure there could be other ways to automate this with more tech, but I am happy with the results.