Detecting Full Barrels
- Thread starter Munchmo
- Start date
-
The FTB Forum is now read-only, and is here as an archive. To participate in our community discussions, please join our Discord! https://ftb.team/discord
might be ugly... but use BC pipes and when no more will fit in, it'll pop out. transposer to pick it up and put through an item detector.
I think relays can produce a redstone signal when they back up. That being true, you can pipe your items through a relay, and shut off the circuit when the relay blocks up.
While it might not exactly be what you had in mind, allegedly Pneumatic Tubes do detect when barrels are full, a fact which many, many people have exploited ruthlessly. So if you have RP2 infrastructure set up, congratulations!
To detect if the barrel is full use gold gates with space in inventory trigger set to item in the barrel. It will detect space in barrel (or any other container) for a specific item, even if all slots are full. Inventory full trigger will fire if there is no free slot in inventory, which is not how barrels work.
If you want to detect to reroute items, if you give items the option to go somewhere else if they can't go into the barrel they will. The easiest way would be with Insertion Pipes from Additional Buildcraft Objects, they always try to insert an item and if it can't be inserted it will continue in the pipe. You can also do that with Diamond pipes though, set the resource that's in the barrel to the side the barrel is on, block the side the item comes from with an item that will never be in the pipe and leave everything else open.
You can also use that setup to create an overflow chest, which would be easy to check with a gate. So you would then have a pipe from your quarry (or anything else) go over your barrel with an Insertion/Diamond pipe and if it can't go into the barrel it will go into the overflow chest, which you check to see if the barrel is full. The downside is that it would get very big though because you'd need an overflow chest for every barrel you have xD
It's a doable setup for systems that only deal with 1 or a few resources though, like mob farms for example.
You can also use that setup to create an overflow chest, which would be easy to check with a gate. So you would then have a pipe from your quarry (or anything else) go over your barrel with an Insertion/Diamond pipe and if it can't go into the barrel it will go into the overflow chest, which you check to see if the barrel is full. The downside is that it would get very big though because you'd need an overflow chest for every barrel you have xD
It's a doable setup for systems that only deal with 1 or a few resources though, like mob farms for example.
I'll have to do some testing with the diamond pipes like you're suggesting, because if that works it might do the trick. I loved the insertion pipes and was really hoping it would be added to the pack, but since this is on a server I don't want to get away from the default pack configs.
Wait wait wait, I've got it:
You can set up an overflow past the barrel using an RP2 restriction tube, feed it into a chest/buffer, and then wire that up. Of course, if you have diamond pipes just lying around, that might be simpler.
You can set up an overflow past the barrel using an RP2 restriction tube, feed it into a chest/buffer, and then wire that up. Of course, if you have diamond pipes just lying around, that might be simpler.
Put a hopper on top of the barrel, pipe items into hopper. Detect when hopper has items in inventory. (IIRC the gate has a slight delay so it won't fire when an item just passes through the hopper.)
[edit] You will lose the one-item-only-allowed functionality, I don't know if that's an issue for you.
[edit] You will lose the one-item-only-allowed functionality, I don't know if that's an issue for you.
You really should look into RP, tubes are superior to BC pipes in nearly every situation. In this instance, RP tubes will only send items to a valid inventory, and they will detect the barrel is full (as long as you feed to the top of the barrel), so will route elsewhere. To be fair, RP transport is a bit more involved than BC, but also much more powerful.
The main issue you have here is that BC pipes aren't actually properly inventory aware, and make all of their decisions for each pipe.
This means that if a cobblestone pipe is presented with an item and 2 possible exits (pipes won't send items back the way they came), it sends it randomly down each possible exit. Since one of the 1.3.2 updates (I think), they're now sufficiently aware that, if an exit won't take the item, it'll go down the next route.
The upshot of this is that, if an item can't go into an inventory, it'll go down the next route, but if it can, about half will go into the inventory, and half will go to the other exit.
Iron pipes force items to go in a specific direction, and, if it can't, it'll pop out. It won't let items go through any other route.
Diamond pipes do a restrict and prefer system. If a direction has an item in the filter, then no items other than those will go through that path, BUT, if those items can't go out that way, they'll take another route.
For a little clarification, imagine a straight pipe, with a barrel set to cobblestone underneath, and a stream of items of various types going through. If it pipe over the barrel is stone, then about half the cobblestone will end up in the barrel, and half will continue on. All other items will continue on.
If the pipe is iron, and pointing to the barrel, all of the cobblestone will go into the barrel, and the other items will pop out.
If the pipe is diamond, with cobblestone in the barrel filter, and the other directions empty, then all of the cobble will go into the barrel, and all other items will continue on, including the cobblestone, when the barrel is full.
In contrast, tubes set the routes of the items when they leave the source, so, if there isn't somewhere for the cobble to go, it won't leave the {filter/transposer/sorter/etc}, and, if that inventory becomes invalid en route, the item will go to the next valid inventory. If there are no valid inventories, it'll retrace it's path, and go back into the output of the machine, where it'll sit, blocking the machine, until it has somewhere to go.
This means that if a cobblestone pipe is presented with an item and 2 possible exits (pipes won't send items back the way they came), it sends it randomly down each possible exit. Since one of the 1.3.2 updates (I think), they're now sufficiently aware that, if an exit won't take the item, it'll go down the next route.
The upshot of this is that, if an item can't go into an inventory, it'll go down the next route, but if it can, about half will go into the inventory, and half will go to the other exit.
Iron pipes force items to go in a specific direction, and, if it can't, it'll pop out. It won't let items go through any other route.
Diamond pipes do a restrict and prefer system. If a direction has an item in the filter, then no items other than those will go through that path, BUT, if those items can't go out that way, they'll take another route.
For a little clarification, imagine a straight pipe, with a barrel set to cobblestone underneath, and a stream of items of various types going through. If it pipe over the barrel is stone, then about half the cobblestone will end up in the barrel, and half will continue on. All other items will continue on.
If the pipe is iron, and pointing to the barrel, all of the cobblestone will go into the barrel, and the other items will pop out.
If the pipe is diamond, with cobblestone in the barrel filter, and the other directions empty, then all of the cobble will go into the barrel, and all other items will continue on, including the cobblestone, when the barrel is full.
In contrast, tubes set the routes of the items when they leave the source, so, if there isn't somewhere for the cobble to go, it won't leave the {filter/transposer/sorter/etc}, and, if that inventory becomes invalid en route, the item will go to the next valid inventory. If there are no valid inventories, it'll retrace it's path, and go back into the output of the machine, where it'll sit, blocking the machine, until it has somewhere to go.
1) Hook a RP tube up to your cobblestone barrel, and pipe it to your quarry.
2) hook a filter up to the bottom of the barrel, ticking once a second.
3) Pipe that shit into the trash
Are you a bad enough dude to live without cobblestone?
2) hook a filter up to the bottom of the barrel, ticking once a second.
3) Pipe that shit into the trash
Are you a bad enough dude to live without cobblestone?
I'm pretty sure that isn't true. If you hook up an Iron pipe to insert stuff into something it'll send it back if that thing is full, at least it used to be like that (yes, that means it sends stuff back to the direction that should be blocked). The only time an Iron pipe can drop stuff is (for example) if it tries to put in a stack of 64, but there is only room for 32, the remaining 32 will go back into the pipe and once they reach the center of the block they will pop out. That only happens with stacks of items though, or very dense streams of individual items.
At least the Iron pipe used to work like that when I first played around with BC, which is quite a while ago. I remember that because it was one of the better pipes for inserting stuff, after Diamond ones with an overflow loop.
When I was playing with the beta pack a while ago (beta pack), it would pop out if I sent the "wrong" item into an iron pipe directed towards a barrel. I can try again and see, but that appeared to be the case.
EDIT: Apologies, just tested it, and it does seem that iron pipes prefer bounce-back, rather than out, but it still doesn't help much if you're trying for a round-robin sorting system