Pneumatic Tubes and Barrels?

[Arathoren]

I've run into an interesting situation that I cannot seem work my way around.

The basic logic of my build is thus:

1. I use an ender chest to dump everything I mine/harvest
2. Sorting Machines 1 and 2 extract from that ender chest.
- SM 1 and 2 only sort ores to Pulverizers and dusts to Powered Furnaces
- Everything else is marked as brown as sent to my wall'o'barrels (The lazy man's sorting system)
3. The pneumatic tubes for my wall-o-barrels ends at a gold chest where Sorting Machine 3 handles the excess.

The purpose of my logic :
1. Cobble is fed into the ender chest after mining/harvesting/building
2. SM 1 and 2 mark the cobble brown and sends it to my wall'o'barrles since they are not specified.
3. Excess cobble overflows into my gold chest at SM3
4. SM3 marks cobble cyan which routes to my Powered Furnaces to become smooth stone
5. Powered Furnaces output into the ender chest that feeds SM 1 and 2
6. Again smooth stone is not specified so it is marked brown and set to the wall'o'barrels

The system goes through another loop where excess smooth stone is turned into stone bricks.

Anyways, the problem I'm running into. After a considerable mining expedition I return home with 18+ stacks of cobble. All of it is dumped into my ender chest to begin looping through the system until my cobble barrel is full, then the smooth stone barrel, then the stone brick barrel. What is actually happening is that roughly half the stacks of cobble bypass the cobble chest before it is full and end up routing through SM3 into my Powered Furnaces.

Has anyone else noticed items bypassing a barrel when the barrel is not full?

In my above build (since I do not have recyclers to handle the final overflow) I'm using an extra-dimensional barrel for my cobble so nothing should overflow for now. At the time of this post I only have ~300 out of the 1024 stack that the barrel should handle. Any ideas as to why, when sending high volume, roughly half of the cobble passes right over the barrel without being deposited?

 

[Zafum]

Would a better system be something more like this?

1. Use and Ender Chest to dump everything you mine/harvest.
2. Sorting Machines 1 and 2 extract from that ender chest.
- SM 1 and 2 only sort ores to Pulverizers and dusts to Powered Furnaces.
- Everything else is marked as brown and sent to a Router with the Thoroughness upgrade, which sorts all the stuff into barrels.
3. The wall-o-barrels ends at a gold chest, which the router sends to if all other barrels are full/used, where Sorting Machine 3 handles the excess.

 

[Peppe]

Is the barrel of cobble and the cobble chest the same distance on the tube network?
If so redpower will split the distribution to euqal length segments in a round robin fashion.

Put a restriction tube on your overflow chest and test it out.

 

[Lambert2191]

pictures also help greatly

 

[Arathoren]

Lambert I would post pictures but I'd have to take my walls apart to show the pipes.

Peppe, no they are not the same distance. In order for an item to reach the chest it has to go through the pipe that leads across all the barrels. There is no other route in the system that leads to that chest. The chest is the end of a considerably long line of barrels.

Zafum, I have never played with routers before but I can give that a shot. I don't need tubes with a router correct?

If I watch the cobble it looks like it tries to enter the barrel and bounces out as if it found a full inventory and then continues on since the chest is the only other valid inventory in the line.

http://imgur.com/VuVyNrU

I tried to use the post image option but it did not extract the image from my upload. Anyways, the primary input is all the way on the bottom right. The pipe runs across the bottom row from right to left. Covers prevent the tubes from connecting to the barrels above them (not sure if it matters). The pipe goes back into the wall then comes out above the second row at the far left. It goes across all the barrels again then comes back from right to left across the top where the pipe is then routed to the gold chest you can see in the lower left.

Cobble has to go over the barrel in order to reach the gold chest.

 

[Peppe]

Lambert I would post pictures but I'd have to take my walls apart to show the pipes.

Peppe, no they are not the same distance. In order for an item to reach the chest it has to go through the pipe that leads across all the barrels. There is no other route in the system that leads to that chest. The chest is the end of a considerably long line of barrels.

Zafum, I have never played with routers before but I can give that a shot. I don't need tubes with a router correct?

If I watch the cobble it looks like it tries to enter the barrel and bounces out as if it found a full inventory and then continues on since the chest is the only other valid inventory in the line.

If it looks like they are bouncing then the issue may be in the barrel and not your network. That reminds me of odd gate behavior i once saw. BC gates on the top of a barrel briefly reads as full inventory every time a new stack is started.

To fix this you might add a filter, a filter into to a hopper, or a filter to a relay on top of that barrel to buffer the input.

 

[Arathoren]

Okay, so I rebuilt a small section of my sorting with a router. They are pretty awesome with one drawback. I have not yet found a way to handle overflow. What happens when the cobble barrel is full? In my above example I want overflow cobble to become smooth stone. When the smooth stone barrel is full I want it to become stone bricks.

I could be missing something though.

 

[Zafum]

You'll need to add the throughness upgrade to your router for this, but what if you attach a chest to your barrel wall, at the farthest point from the router? So, if all barrels are full, the overflow goes into the chest, and you can use a sorting machine to put it back through your system.

 

[Arathoren]

Zafum, I played with that for a bit. The router appears to go in a specific order so it was placing items in the chest even though the barrel wasn't full. Even with the thoroughness upgrade. I was able to fix my problem with the tubes by adding a loop before the overflow would reach my third sorting machine. It was an ugly solution but basically at the intersection cobble will find the barrel to be the closest inventory and try again.