Automating Essentia Transport with Factorization Servos
Factorization servos can be used as movable deployers thanks to the robotic arm. Using this principle, a servo can use a phial to move essential from alembics to jars.
Emptying the alembics
A servo first needs to pass some alembics with a phial in its inventory. On each rail that is adjacent to an alembic, apply a socket signal instruction. This causes the robotic arm to right click. Make sure the robotic arm is facing the alembics as the servo passes using the point top instruction.
Those iron bars are just servo rail decorations that I use to make the area a bit neater. My servo enters through the top hole and passes each alembic. The robotic arm will right click each alembic and if the robotic arm has an empty phial and the alembic has at least 8 essentia the essentia will go into the phial. With a full phial the servo will then go back through the lower hole to access the jars.
Filling the essentia jars
Behind my wall of jars I set up my servo rails like this. Those funny green jars are from technomancy by the way, they are like normal jars but can store more essentia.
It may look complicated but it is actually very simple. Behind every jar is a servo rail with the socket signal instruction. This causes the servo to right click the filled phial onto the jar. If the jar essentia matches the the phial essentia and there is room then the essential will be filled into the jar. I extend the servo rail all the way around my jar area to make sure each jar is serviced (I planned some extra room for expansion too). I use the set direction and point top instructions to make sure that the servo goes around the circuit correctly and also to make sure that the robotic arm is always facing the jars.
Right clicking a jar with > 8 essentia with an empty phial will withdraw the essentia into the phial. This is of course a problem. This takes me to the next stage of my design.
Recycling empty phials
Behind every jar is a servo rail and behind these servo rails are a type of socket machine from Factorization called the item shifter. These transfer items from between 2 inventories (including servos) with a couple of useful controls. Behind the item shifter is a machine called the paraseive. These are capable of adding a filter to the item shifter to make sure that only a certain type of material is "item shifted". Like I said earlier item shifters can only move items from one inventory to another. That is where those transfer nodes come into play.
I am using these item shifters to take empty phials out of servo and put them back into that Jabba barrel you can see in the top right of the last image (via the transfer nodes).
The item shifters are configured as in this picture.
The parasieves have an empty phial in their filter.
The redstone blocks beside the item shifters are there to provide the high redstone signal the item shifters require in order to work. This system is expensive (especially in terms of redstone). However it ensures that phials are removed from servos as soon as they have been used. There is another item shifter on the jabba barrel that allows one empty phial to be placed back into the servo. That shifter is set to "export from back", "pulse exact amount", amount = 1, target slot = any slot. It is controlled with a redstone pulse servo instruction. The servo finishes its route around all the jars, adding essentia where it can and then it returns to the alembics with a new empty phial. (No phials are lost, and I keep a small stock in the barrel just to keep things working nicely but I will never need to resupply).
Conclusion
This was a fun project to do although it is probably in the realm of vanity project. It costs tons of redstone. Each parasieve and item shifter requires a block of redstone (turned into logic matrices in a crystalliser) and I have about 60 of each. Then there is the extra redstone I used to power the shifters. If you are already heavily invested in the FZ tech tree though it is much easier to get done.
I am not that good with servos so I might be missing a better and cheaper way of getting this done using the more advanced functions.
It also suffers from the main drawback of phials. Only 8 essentia can be transferred at a time which means you can't empty 7 or less essential from an alembic or add to a jar that has 57 or more essentia in it. However, servos don't have movement derps like golems do, nor do they have problems distributing many types of essentia like pipes do.
