A Player's Guide to Redpower 2 Blutricity

[Omicron]

I once made a post on the Technic forums taking apart the mechanics of the Thermopile. Let me see if I can find it again, and I'll copy the relevant parts over here. TL;DR: fire works, flowing lava/water works, ice and snow work. Some of them even have different efficiency values. But, due to peculiarities, the 1x lava + 4x water setup generating 50 W is the best possible setup you can have.

I did not test with microblocks made from snow or ice, I'll put that on my list of things to test as well.

 

[TheLoneWolfling]

See here

TL;DR version: 3 water 1 lava is best, at 0.375W.

 

[Omicron]

That's not correct, TheLoneWolfling. You can use more than 4 sides - one is needed for the cable, but the other five can all be used if you build it right. For example, lava in a hole in the floor, thermopile above it, and surrounded by 4 water with the cable going up.

Here's a screenshot of the thermopile I have in my current house. One block of lava, 3 blocks of water, and a fourth block of water embedded into the wall behind it. It generates 0.5 A, as I confirmed with my voltmeter.

Also, here's my old post I meant to copy over:

"For the Thermopile to generate energy, it needs a "hot budget" and a "cold budget". Both must be present, it is not enough to slap down a very hot or cold block on its own and hope to match it against the neutral environment. Different blocks are worth different amounts of hot or cold "budget":

Fire: 0.125A "hot"
Lava: 0.500A "hot"
Water: 0.125A "cold"
Snow: 0.500A "cold"
Ice: 0.500A "cold"

Adding one block of Lava allows the Thermopile to generate up to 0.5A in energy, if it has that much "cold budget" as well. Meaning, it needs to have either an ice or snow block, or four blocks of water next to it. However, one Lava and four blocks of Ice still only generate 0.5A, because even though there is 2.0A worth of "cold budget", the single block of Lava is still only worth 0.5A.

Other examples, to visualize it:
1x Fire + 1x Water: 0.125A
1x Fire + 2x Water: 0.125A
2x Fire + 2x Water: 0.250A
2x Fire + 1x Snow: 0.250A
2x Lava + 3x Water: 0.375A

Since there are five valid faces, the absolute maximum you can get a Thermopile to output is 1.000A, using two Lava and two Snow/Ice blocks. However, since the Snow/Ice will always melt from the nearby lava, this is not a stable configuration. The best stable output is 0.500A, using the 1x Lava, 4x Water setup that is mentioned on the wiki."

 

[TheLoneWolfling]

Yeah, that is the actual maximum. However, they cannot be space-efficiently stacked with 5 sides used, which is what I was trying to say.

 

[Bagman817]

Thank you for this Omicron, this should be a sticky.

 

[Omicron]

New testing results:

Added storage capacity of charging bench and sonic screwdriver, energy consumption of sonic screwdriver.

Evil Hamster: Resistance of arbitrary blulectric devices (furnaces, battery boxes, charging benches etc.) appears to be close to the same as blue alloy wire.

ICountFrom0: the flat snow covering works with the thermopile. Its "cold budget" is 0.25 A, half that of a full-size snow block.

 

[vineet]

So how much power does a frame motor require?

 

[Bukky]

So how much power does a frame motor require?

Ya I am interested in frame motors as well. I'm trying to make my frame ship as fast as possible so what would be a good setup for charging a frame motor quickly? All the setups I have tried result in the motors eventually running out of power and having to skip a movement so they can charge. Thanks for the guide!

 

[Democretes]

Ya I am interested in frame motors as well. I'm trying to make my frame ship as fast as possible so what would be a good setup for charging a frame motor quickly? All the setups I have tried result in the motors eventually running out of power and having to skip a movement so they can charge. Thanks for the guide!

The best setup would be to have wire next to the position it stops at and where it moves to. It should keep them charged enough to where they only skip a movement in about 1 in every 30 or so. If that's not good enough for you, do two sets frame motors for each direction and have them switch off so they can charge while the other is moving.

 

[Omicron]

The issue with charging frame motors is not that they consume a whole lot of energy, but rather the fact that if you pulse them fast enough they spend more or less all their time moving and not charging. A battery box or two dumping their internal storage into the network is pretty much the fastest energy supply you can implement in that confined an area, but the frame motor still needs to stop and hold still to charge itself.

Due to the nature of the motors, i can probably tell you an energy cost per movement, but not a general power draw as that depends entirely on the speed you pulse them with.

 

[ratchet freak]

I believe it also depends on how many blocks you are moving at one time

 

[TheLoneWolfling]

I believe it also depends on how many blocks you are moving at one time

That it does. Try putting a batbox beside a frame motor with x frames and see how many pulses until it won't work.

You may have to build something to destroy frames at the front and place new ones at the back, though.

 

[Abdiel]

Somebody please help me understand how this works.

Setup:

Batbox 1 -- LV wire -- transformer -- MV wire -- transformer -- LV wire -- batbox 2.

Spoiler

I charged the first batbox with a bunch of batteries to full power, and there is another full battery in it. But the second batbox won't charge at all. The colored left bar sits at around 90%, but the blue energy bar has a few pixels in it and isn't increasing. I left the setup alone for about 30 minutes, no change. Voltmeter reads zero A and W everywhere, 88.6V at batboxes and 8860V at transformers. Is this working as intended? Why isn't the second batbox charging?

 

[Omicron]

Because a battery box cannot charge another battery box, no matter what the setup.

A battery box discharges its internal storage so long as the outside network is below 80 V. It will stop discharging itself once it reaches or surpasses that point. However, the empty battery box will not begin charging itself until the outside network goes over 90 V. Since the first battery box will never push it that high, the second one will never charge. That it even went as high as 88V is attributed to overswinging alone and in fact quite unusual.

 

[Abdiel]

Why then, if I place several batboxes next to each other, and wire power to the first one, all get charged?

 

[Omicron]

Because the power you wire to the first one presumably comes from an actual power generator. Something that can push the voltage above 90V by itself. And since all blutricity blocks are conductors, the power you wire to the the first one eventually reaches all of them.

If you removed the link to the power generating device while the first battery box was half full, and the others were not, the charge would not equalize. It would continue to sit exactly as it is, because the voltage is not low enough for the half-full battery box to discharge. And if it was, it wouldn't be high enough for the others to charge in return.

Think of a pedestrian crossing. When the cars drive, the cars have a green light and the pedestrians have red. When the pedestrians get green, the cars have red. You can never have pedestrians and cars cross the same road at the same time (obviously it has been engineered so to avoid desaster). They are mutually exclusive states. It is the same with battery boxes - charging and discharging are mutually exclusive. You cannot have both occuring on the same power network, unless you have an absolutely enormous voltage differential due to distance. And at that point, the two battery boxes in question may as well be regarded as two entirely separate things.

 

[Omicron]

Updated with energy need of Frame Motors.

 

[TheLoneWolfling]

Updated with energy need of Frame Motors.

Could you please include the movement rate of frame motors as well?

 

[Omicron]

I didn't really attempt to measure that; this thread is meant to be about blutricity, not about frame machines.

But from my gut feeling, I was able to pulse the frame motors about once per second at the fastest. This also matches what I hear DW20 say in his youtube videos.

It's really easy to test for yourself, though. Just have a frame motor, a battery box, a timer and check how fast you can set the timer before the motor starts skipping pulses.

 

[Kocyk]

For frame motors it's exactly 0.8s. At that rate you get smooth movement.