Automating Tiny Piles with the Packager

[d34dl0ck]

I am wondering if anyone else has tried to automate ore production with one of these.

http://feed-the-beast.wikia.com/wiki/Packager

I have a Packager being fed the tiny piles generated from the Industrial grinder. I have a hopper on top to catch any overflow, but I am running into an issue when anywhere from 1-3 of a tiny pile get stuck in the packager, essentially clogging it. If that happens, and 4 of a different kind of pile end up in the hopper, nothing gets processed even if another of the tiny pile IN the packager comes along. Any ideas/suggestions on how to handle this scenario?

 

[Grunguk]

It's a tricky one. You can opt instead to use a gregtech electric crafting table set to tiny pile mode. It accepts up to 9 different types of dust, compiles them if it possibly can and if the entire inventory is full of "partials" that it can't compile, it'll clear the 9th slot. Loop any outputted tiny piles back to the input chest and it'll basically cycle continuously and compile every dust.

If you're stuck on using packagers; a redpower filter can be specifically set to pull/export only a stack of 4 tiny piles at a time, but it's limited to 9 different types of dust. You would have to have several different filter/packager nodes configured specifically to compiling certain dusts. Doable, but a bit overdesigned.

 

[d34dl0ck]

The electric crafting table seems like the way to go. I will have to look at that. It sounds like it has a rather steep EU cost per item crafted, though. I guess that's the tradeoff. Thanks for the tip! I will let you know how it turns out.

 

[Skirty_007]

I had 4 or 5 electric crafting tables in my ultimate world, for tiny piles and nuggets. I think I still had some tiny piles with no place to be made into dust, I just kept adding machines as required. Also getting documentation on those things is impossible, I ended up having to go into a creative test world to figure them out.

 

[Grunguk]

I had 4 or 5 electric crafting tables in my ultimate world, for tiny piles and nuggets. I think I still had some tiny piles with no place to be made into dust, I just kept adding machines as required. Also getting documentation on those things is impossible, I ended up having to go into a creative test world to figure them out.

Hmm, well if you pump tiny piles into the green side and place a chest at the red side, you can do every tiny pile/nugget with a single electric crafting table.

 

[Skirty_007]

I should have clarified, I was using ae, and the way I sent the dusts I could only send 8 to each one. I think I could have done it a few different ways, but as I didn't understand the behaviour of the table as you explained above, I probably wouldn't have.

 

[Grunguk]

Ah, gotcha. Really, the tricky part of the circuit is finding a way to continually pump the large variety of different dusts into the table without it overflowing; the table has a bit of a delay before the automatic unclogging.

Buildcraft pipes would spill as autarchic gates/redstone engines pump faster than the table unclogs, so some tiny piles would pop out of the pipes before it caught up.

Outputting the tiny piles to a chest and sending it in into the table via a Transposer/Timer will work in a 1.4.7 world at least. If you want to stick with a GT solution, you can use an electric transposer in the same way.

Probably how I'll go in 1.5 with the removal of RP2.

 

[d34dl0ck]

Automatic crafting table, where have you been all my life. Also, Applied Energistics is my new favorite mod... No more Tiny Piles! I wish I had known about it months ago... Thanks for the tip, Grunguk!