Controlling overflow with BuildCraft Pipes

[Phantomizer]

I did an experimental setup, more for fun then for actual efficiency or increased productivity where i hooked up a Chest to a Wooden Transport Pipe (which has an Autharchic Gate on it) which in turn is hooked up to a series of Golden Transport Pipes to an Electric Furnace connected to another Wooden Pipe (with an Autharchic Gate) which in turn is hooked up to a Golden Transport Pipe which leads to a final chest.

The purpose is to put stuff in the chest which is automatically sent to the Furnace for smelting and sent back to a destination chest.

Now here's my problem which is frustrating me a lot because it's not the first time i run into it. Whenever items are being delivered to the Furnace faster then it can smelt them, the stuff starts getting spilled on the ground. Same thing when a new type of item attempts to enter the Furnace before it's finished smelting the current item.

How do i prevent this from happening? Other then reverting back to Transposers and Pneumatic pipes from RedPower 2?

Thanks

 

[heggico]

If you don't have a ton of ores at once in the system, you could just make a loop close to the furnace using regular pipes and an iron pipe. Just be carefull that there won't be a few thousand items circling around. Or loop it back to the chest.

If it's only sometimes that it overflows, like when your smelting iron and it tries to add copper, you could just add a hopper on top of the furnace to get a small buffer.

Even better solution: make more furnaces

 

[Bickers]

pipe the items into hoppers on the furnace

 

[Bagman817]

Because Buildcraft. RP2 doesn't have the overflow problem (which, I see you realize), another solution would be Advanced Energistics, but that would not be available early game.

You can make a largish 'loop' that makes an intersection at the (potentially full) hopper and returns to the chest (or itself, with a diamond pipe directing traffic). This would give the ores a 50% chance to not go into an empty hopper, but shouldn't attempt to enter a full hopper and overflow.

 

[Freakscar]

Create a switch with diamond pipes that are set to two ways - either a) into the furnace or b) elsewhere/back to chest. That way, as long as there is space inside the furnace, the d.pipe will send the items into the furnace. If the furnace is full / not valid (different ore being processed), it'll resort to the second path, leading it back where it came from.

 

[Phantomizer]

Thanks for the suggestions.

Is Advanced Energistics the mod that has that Digital Chest which can (theoretically) hold anything and everything you could possibly ever have?

 

[Whovian]

May I suggest something?

Iron Pipes change direction when hit with a Redstone signal. Gates can detect overflow. Redpower (or, I guess, Vanilla redstone also works) can process overflow/lack thereof into pulses to the Iron Pipe.

 

[Zjarek_S]

May I suggest something?

Iron Pipes change direction when hit with a Redstone signal. Gates can detect overflow. Redpower (or, I guess, Vanilla redstone also works) can process overflow/lack thereof into pulses to the Iron Pipe.

You don't need special redstone wiring or even pulses for this. Just place an iron pipe surrounded by wooden pipe from input side and other pipe for both machine and overflow. Iron pipe won't choose wooden pipe as a valid destination, so there are only 2 options, output and overflow. Iron pipe changes output on redstone change, so in this situation (one wooden pipe and 2 other valid destinations) one destination will be active when there is redstone signal to the iron pipe and the other when there is no signal. Here is better, visual example: http://imgur.com/a/qpsrW . This redstone sitting on the block powered by gate is essential here to ensure correct work after restarting the game.

 

[Phantomizer]

You don't need special redstone wiring or even pulses for this. Just place an iron pipe surrounded by wooden pipe from input side and other pipe for both machine and overflow. Iron pipe won't choose wooden pipe as a valid destination, so there are only 2 options, output and overflow. Iron pipe changes output on redstone change, so in this situation (one wooden pipe and 2 other valid destinations) one destination will be active when there is redstone signal to the iron pipe and the other when there is no signal. Here is better, visual example: http://imgur.com/a/qpsrW . This redstone sitting on the block powered by gate is essential here to ensure correct work after restarting the game.

That's an interesting solution, ty

 

[Ako_the_Builder]

Thanks for the suggestions.

Is Advanced Energistics the mod that has that Digital Chest which can (theoretically) hold anything and everything you could possibly ever have?

pretty much yes.

for your current issue:

chest with autarchic gate set to: red pipe signal on, energy pulser
hopper on furnace
hopper with iron gate set to: inventory empty, red pipe signal on
red wire on pipes from chest to hopper

The problem with this setup is the speed of autarchic gates was improved (at the same time the ultimate pack came out I think) which can cause too much stuff to enter the pipe if your pipe is long, so make it short as possible. The autarchic gates are still being improved and (as I understand it) will be able to pulse once per signal for single items or stacks of items in some future build.

 

[Louistheboy]

the feedback loop works but im having a problem i have pipes that are supposed to be taking the ingots out of my furnace but my ingots are just popping out of the furnaces

 

[Henry Link]

@Louistheboy you are new so I'll give you some advise. First this should be asked in its own thread rather than resurrecting a thread that is almost 4 years old. It is usually frowned upon to resurrect dead threads unless you are adding some really relevant information to that thread. Also, when you ask a question like this you really should provide some pics of your setup. We can't read your mind and we don't know what is causing. So my suggestion is to either post this question in a new thread or ask in the "Ask a simple question, get a simple answer" thread.

 

[Drbretto]

I solved this practically without any gates (I have yet to even make an assembly table). No redstone, no nothing.

The furnaces are all connected to a single-input item sorter. Before getting to the main sorting machine, it has a single diamond sorting pipe that has separate outputs for coal, anything I want cooked, and destroys trash. Everything else bypasses to the main machine to be sorted into one of 38 chests.

The coal line runs a parallel line along the back of 6 furnaces. It's random, but using the laws of probability, it will fill them up in order from left to right. As they fill up, any excess coal gets pushed along to the coal chest.

The items I want cooked all first go to an intermediary chest. That chest has one output, split two ways, then each of those outputs split three ways. This gives an equal probability for any item to end up in any furnace so you utilize more of them at a time, and relatively evenly. Each of these outputs connects directly to each furnace without connecting to each other via stone/cobblestone/quartz pipes, and at the point where it enters the furnace, it also loops back to the original chest. If the item is intended to go into the furnace but can't for any reason, like the wrong item in the furnace or it's full, the item will go back into the chest and wait to be released again.

This method allows the furnaces to be 100% automatic. I can connect the input of the sorter to a quarry via ender chest and run them all day. All ores/food that needs to be cooked gets cooked and I never need to restock the coal because any quarry job brings in more coal than I can use.

It works 100% of the time. It doesn't get jammed up at all. And it's very very efficient. I can run a quarry over a desert and smelt the glass nearly in real-time.

For funzies, I also ran an array of pipes and vacuum hoppers under the carpets so I dont' even need to put these in the ender chest. I can cook and sort everything in my inventory by literally throwing anything on the ground anywhere in my base. If ever there was overflow, the floors would pick them up and run them right through again until there's room.