Filler wont restart?

[neiromaru]

I'm trying to use a solar powered steve's cart to farm trees. Unfortunatly the leaves are opaque enough to block the cart's solar panels, and it keeps running out of power.

I'm trying to use four fillers to keep the areas above the tracks clear, but when I place them, they clear the leaves once, then turn red and don't clear any new leaves that appear. The only way I've found to make them restart is to remove and replace one of the glass blocks in the filler's clear pattern, but I don't know of a way to automate that.

I've tried toggling the fillers, and the tesseracts powering them, with redstone, but that doesn't seem to do anything.

Is there anyway to make the fillers keep running? or to automatically turn them back on periodically?


I've also tried using a turtle to clear the leaves, but it doesn't go fast enough, and the cart still gets stuck eventually.

 

[chendar]

As far as I know there's no easy way to get around this. Only way to make fillers run again after they stop seems to be either refreshing the pattern inside or restarting the world(which isn't very pratical I guess ;P)

What I usually do is just put a coal engine on the cart aswell and put it on lower priority than the solar one so that it doesn't run unless needed.

If there are other ways to solve this I'd be really interested aswell.

 

[Henry Link]

I used the coal engine as a lower priority as well. The coal engine will burn anything. So I have my unload station configured to feed wood back into the engine slots so that the cart will always have power. I also used a turtle with a detector track (redstone signal) after the unload station to empty the station and dump it into my storage network. This makes sure the cart finishes unload/ reload fuel before the items are removed by the turtle.

 

[QKninja]

Another option I used once (though impractical) is to put glass above all the rails, then stack this glass above the height that trees grow. The cart can now operate on sunlight through the glass, and the leaves won't grow where the glass is. However, this seemed to be somewhat buggy and occasionally required a manual block to be cleared. I eventually switched to blaze rod power from my tier 5 shard on a lower priority

 

[DustyBlue]

Is there anyway to make the fillers keep running? or to automatically turn them back on periodically?

Simple answer... no.
if you really want to go this route a turtle with a crescent hammer may be able to reset the filler but I don't know and can't/won't check because i don't use my filler that way. very power hungry

 

[Drkevlar]

Do normal solar panels work under leaves?

Sounds to me you accidentally picked the wrong engine and would like to change it to a coal engine

Edit:
Thinking about this a little bit, but it seems more of a hassle to keep the leaves from growing above the track, then to just set up a cargo manager and distributor for solid fuel.