Applied Energistics sorting question

[Yusunoha]

I'm quite new to AE and I am slowly starting to transfer my storage to AE, but I want to sort my items in a certain way and I don't know how to do that.

basically I want to have a drive for things like cobblestone, sand, dirt, gravel, all that kind of stuff. but once that drive gets full, I want all the excess going to recyclers till there's space for it in the drive again. I found out you can set priorities with using a wrench on the storage blocks, but like I said I'm still quite new to AE and don't really know what would be the best way to do it.

and if I'd use the wrench and priority route, would it be a good idea to use storage busses on recyclers, or would that not work?

 

[Greyed]

Mind you I am coming from this having not messed with IC2 for a few months, sooo, some interpretation might be required.

If I recall correctly the recyclers respond to redstone, yes? If so you can place a Level Emitter on one and configure it to turn on when the levels of cruft get to high. Then use an export bus to send the requisite items to the recycler. When you have room, the recyclers don't run and your storage fills up. When your storage has an excess the recyclers run.

 

[Sub]

There's a block called ME preformatter you can put drives in it and specify what items to accept and then set it to priority 1 and the recycler to priority 2

 

[Yusunoha]

Mind you I am coming from this having not messed with IC2 for a few months, sooo, some interpretation might be required.

If I recall correctly the recyclers respond to redstone, yes? If so you can place a Level Emitter on one and configure it to turn on when the levels of cruft get to high. Then use an export bus to send the requisite items to the recycler. When you have room, the recyclers don't run and your storage fills up. When your storage has an excess the recyclers run.

hmm, I never heard anything about redstone signals affecting recyclers. I do know they can effect EU storage blocks, and the advanced machines, but I don't know about the recycler...
and a big problem for me is, I have no idea really how to use the level emitter... I know how it works, and what it's used for but I guess I lack the creativity for using it xD

 

[PonyKuu]

Export bus can be set to respond to redstone signal.

 

[Greyed]

Yeah, if they don't, my apologies. Like I said, been months since IC2's been on my machine. I'm basing the idea on how I kept my last decent world stocked with sand and glass. I had a level emitter, export bus and import bus attached to a TE Pulverizer and Powered furnace. Any time my glass dropped below 128 the emitter on my furnace turned on and it started smelting sand into glass. If the sand reserves dropped below 128, the associated pulverizer turned on and started chewing through cobble. Did the same for wood -> wood planks and the sawmill.

So I just see this as a reverse of that operation, but assuming the recyclers response to redstone. If they don't, I'm not sure. I haven't had an established 1.5.x AE network to play with yet. I'm new to the priority mechanics so there might be something there. Or maybe you can rig something up with a buffer chest and an autarchic gate? IE, instead of having the recycler respond to redstone, have the gate respond which would start it pulling from an overflow chest?

Orrrr, follow the Ninjapony's suggestion.

 

[Sub]

hmm, I never heard anything about redstone signals affecting recyclers. I do know they can effect EU storage blocks, and the advanced machines, but I don't know about the recycler...
and a big problem for me is, I have no idea really how to use the level emitter... I know how it works, and what it's used for but I guess I lack the creativity for using it xD

Well you can use the black ME cable that swtches with redstone signals

 

[Yusunoha]

hmm, kind of sad that using the level emitter requires me to use several recyclers, one for each item... I'm more of a compact and cheap design... or am I perhaps missing something that could still let me do this? using 1 recycler for several items that are in the same drive, and when in that drive an item goes over a certain number it gets recycled, and all ofcourse as compact as possible?

 

[PonyKuu]

Oh, fudge, that's bad...

You can use a preformatted cell in a drive with one priority and a storage bus on a chest with lower priority. Heck, if storage bus can work with recycler directly - that would be even better! Or, maybe not on a recycler, but on a hopper or a relay. that feeds the recycler. Try that.

 

[plzent3r]

Use the level emitter to tell the export bus to send the stuff when the level of stuff you want to recycle is at a high enough number for you. Make sure you tell the export bus to respond to redstone signal though.[DOUBLEPOST=1367852160][/DOUBLEPOST]As for your problem of using one level emitter per recycler you could do this: instead of having the export bus go to the recycler directly, or maybe a hopper/relay above, why not hook it up to a router which then feeds the items into as many recyclers as you want? You can also do the same with the scrap: Have a router extracting the scrap from all of the machines and attach an import bus right on the router. 1 export, 1 import, as many machines as necessary in between.

 

[Peppe]

Emitters and export buses are the way to control exact amounts of materials. To me they are expensive, both high resource and energy cost. If the amount you want to keep can be the size of one pre-formatted disk though, then you can pool many items together on a single storage bus.

Pre-format all the recyclable materials onto individual storage disks and stick them in a drive/chests. Using the lowest storage disk they will each hold 8128 items.

Put a storage bus on a chest and set the filter of the bus for your recyclable materials.

Optionally setup another storage bus to an incinerator block. With the recyclable materials to allow your network destroy the material instead of fill up unformatted disks.

Set the prioty of the pre-formatted disks to be the highest of the 3. Recycle storage bus middle value, and incinerator lowest value.

Use some inventory management system to pull materials from the chest and distribute to your recycler(s). In 1.5 enderchests and vanilla hoppers are very good at this, but you could use any inventory system to pull from the chest and route it to recycler(s).

If you only want one recycler you could put the storage bus directly on the recycler and save on some complexity.

Think the incinerator block + storage bus is very useful on any network to keep unformatted disks from filling up with useless stuff.

 

[CodaPDX]

Frankly, it doesn't make much sense to send all of your junk to a recycler, when you can just stick an igneous extruder on top of a recycler and call it good. It's faster (and easier to manage) if you just point your overflow buses at an incinerator and rely on the infinite cobble the extruder gives you for your scrap needs.

 

[PonyKuu]

Actually, one extruder is only a tiny bit faster than non-overclocked recycler. That might be too slow.

 

[Ako_the_Builder]

If playing with gtech - 7 extruders/1 recycler needed to create enough scrap for a matter fab being fed 8k eu. Without gtech you burn through 100 times more scrap for the same power input so saving all your spare/unwanted blocks makes more sense.

 

[PonyKuu]

last time I used recyclers to make fertilizer for my MFR treefarm

 

[Ako_the_Builder]

last time I used recyclers to make fertilizer for my MFR treefarm

Good point, I always forget about that.

 

[Yusunoha]

I'll try out some ideas mentioned in here, thanks for the help
also, I don't want to use the igneous extruders for scrap, it just feels to cheap for me by doing that, and since I am playing the Ultimate pack, I get enough scrap from my quarry for my fabricator.

 

[CodaPDX]

If you're in ultimate, you can throw otherwise useless stuff like green sapphires (pulverized) into your matterfab instead of scrap. With a quarry running, you'll mine more than enough of the stuff to keep up.

 

[Exasperation]

What I like to do for this sort of situation is the following: put an item tesseract on top of each recycler set to a "recycler in" frequency and on "receive only". Then I have level emitter triggered export buses attached to "send only" tesseracts on the same frequency. You can have up to 6 export buses per sending tesseract, and any number of receiving tesseracts, and it will spread the things to be recycled out among whichever recyclers have empty space. You can also mix in an always active export bus or two if you have things you always want to recycle as well as things you want to recycle past a certain limit. I have multiple setups like this:
One for bee products: combs and things like wispy propolis are always sent to the centrifuges (I think I have 6 or so at the moment, but can easily add more), but I have a level emitter controlling propolis overflow so that I have a reserve that I can use and any excess is turned into sticky resin. I'm just about to the point where I have to add a second sending tesseract (on the first tesseract it's one face for propolis, the other 5 for 40 types of combs/specialty propolis).
One for burnables being sent to generators: excess planks from my automated tree farm are level controlled so I always have planks on hand and the excess get burned (spread out among a dozen or so generators), and certain other things just get sent to the generators automatically (wood pulp, for example).