Episode 54 - time to automate some HDPE plastic which is used in the creative vending recipe. Also, a quick update for you guys
1) It took me a while to figure this out, set up and tune so I thought I'd share it to help the community:
Background
The typical way of automating quantum entangled singularities is to set an export bus to export ender dust and singularities once the entangled singularities level drops below a certain level, using a level emitter. The export bus delivers the items to a dropper which triggers TNT to be placed and triggered. This has a few issues:
A) If the level emitter detects thst you have a shortage of Quantum entangled singularities but you have no singularities in stock then the system will indefinately export ender dust only, wasting resources. If you have ender dust on autocraft then this will burn through your ender pearls pretty fast. It continues doing this because the level emitter will not change.
B) vice versa for the singularities - lack of ender dust = wasted singularities.
C) even if you do have both items in stock the way export buses work means that it might eject an unbalanced amount of items (one item first, typically resulting in more ender dust being dropped than required) which is wasteful. Same goes for vice versa.
D) if TNT stock (or the ingredients) is depleted then the export bus exports indefinitely, wasting both items
Solution
I made a system for the next episode of my series to fix this, essentially using 3 level emitters into an RFtools logic gate that checks if all 3 things are true:
i) Do I have ender dust
ii) Do I have singularities
iii) is the quantum entangled singularities stock <10 (fuzzy card required for the level emitter)
If all of these things are true then a redstone signal is emitted into an RFtools sequencer set to pulse for 4 ticks on, 61 off. It is set to only run again if it is still receiving a redstone signal. The sequencer basically slows down the speed of 2 export buses (1 for dust, 1 for singularities) so that 1 set of items is delivered between checking stock levels. This delivers a slow and evenly distributed amount of dust and singularities. and as soon as one of the stock levels depletes the export shuts off.
The chest then distributes the 1 dust and 1 singularitiy to a precision dropper where they are dropped into a pressure plate. This plate activates and does two things: the first is to switch on the heaters to a steam boiler using an IC2 splitter. With 3 heaters it takes 30 seconds to go from ambient (24°C) to 100°C. Once the steam boiler reaches 100°C with the pressure release set to 0bar it starts to explode (non-destructively) which forms the singularities. A ranged collector set to black-list dust and singularities then collects the quantum entangled singularities and sends them into a crate with an AE2 storage bus. Once the pressure plate is released by the absence of items the heaters shut off and the explosions stop.
Issues
I haven't had any imbalance of items yet, but as a belt and braces approach the pressure plate also activates a count down timer linked to another ranged collector that will pick up any stray dust and singularities should an imbalance occur.
Exactly 10 singularities and 10 ender dust are distributed before the boiler has time to heat up and make the first pair of singularities. This is unwanted but I'm working on it
Hope this helps someone who is as fanatical about automation as I am
Hope you guys enjoy the episode
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My Age of Engineering Series:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUZaEaeCvlj6ChY3jks-N8rW74_3qEtmD