re-battery transportation

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Flyin_spaghetti

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Jul 29, 2019
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Is it possible to make a system that will allow filled batteries to enter a IC2 energy storage device and return them when they are empty? I suppose this can be done with managers, but they are kinda hard to build in large amounts and I think I would have to place batteries in various charge levels so that it wont eject the battery when it is partially uncharged.
 

NTaylor

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Jul 29, 2019
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Is it possible to make a system that will allow filled batteries to enter a IC2 energy storage device and return them when they are empty? I suppose this can be done with managers, but they are kinda hard to build in large amounts and I think I would have to place batteries in various charge levels so that it wont eject the battery when it is partially uncharged.

In a similar fashion as to how you would set up a automated BT battery filler it can be done with a filter and a retriever simply tell the filter to pull empty batteries from a chest and put them into the charging area then have a retriever set to pull full batteries from the charging area into the chest. Make it an ender chest and set an ender pouch to the same code and you would have portable 'Infinite' (if you use a lot of solars or whatever) power.
 

Flyin_spaghetti

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yay I didn't know about retrievers. that is my plan. I do not want to deal with energy production around my home anymore so I will move everything to another age with eternal day. And batteries wont lose energy in long distances. And it will be more practical I suppose as pneumatic tubes can be used with covers unlike IC2 cables. I wonder if eliminating energy storage all together and powering machines with transported batteries will be practical enough for household use.
 

Whovian

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Oh, Redpower! Didn't think of that! Another way I came up with a little while ago was with Routers, since empty Re-Batteries have a different ID than full Re-Batteries.
 

Guswut

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RedPower works but it is a good bit laggy when you have a lot of them set up around your world.

Golems would be a fairly nice "seemingly low tech" solution.

Personally, I use a turtle to compare the state of the battery in the device with the state of an empty battery of the same type, and move/grab batteries as needed. It's a much cleaner and simpler way if you can do some LUA programming.
 

NTaylor

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RedPower works but it is a good bit laggy when you have a lot of them set up around your world.

Golems would be a fairly nice "seemingly low tech" solution.

Personally, I use a turtle to compare the state of the battery in the device with the state of an empty battery of the same type, and move/grab batteries as needed. It's a much cleaner and simpler way if you can do some LUA programming.

If you dont like RP becuase it lags it would be possible with one of the BC addons (cant quite remember which) that adds advanced wooden pipes that can only pull certain items.
 

Guswut

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If you dont like RP becuase it lags it would be possible with one of the BC addons (cant quite remember which) that adds advanced wooden pipes that can only pull certain items.

Emerald pipes, which could work, yes.

But, and you may not know this about me, but... Well... I love turtles.

Silliness aside, a turtle is a LOT cheaper than an emerald pipe, and only a bit more complicated to set up.
 

Flyin_spaghetti

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hmm I like turtles as well but I'm not sure how practical it would be to wander around the infrastructure of the house where I will often go to add stuff. Though a persistent movement code will prevent them from causing problems if I encounter them, I tend to forget such things as their travel paths and might place something in their way when they are not there.

So in the current plan, when a battery is used up it will be summoned by the retriever and the filter will start sending out multiple batteries as it won't know its target can only take one. So they will be sent out and get stuck at the pipes till they are needed which will lag it like hell I assume. Reducing the timer frequency or placing a relay to return the excess batteries helps. But this is only with a small test system, I have no idea how will it be on a whole house. I might have to stick to turtles or abandon it all together.

(just to share here is the structure of the house: outer wall full block, air, inner wall cover, inside. It allows changing things without destroying and having to redesign the whole thing or looking ugly. outer block could be covers too for more space but I didn't want it to blow up completely if a creeper comes close, I will probably change it though.
 

Guswut

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hmm I like turtles as well but I'm not sure how practical it would be to wander around the infrastructure of the house where I will often go to add stuff. Though a persistent movement code will prevent them from causing problems if I encounter them, I tend to forget such things as their travel paths and might place something in their way when they are not there.

The concept is that you use one turtle, two ender chests, and a power storage device as a "remote power unit". The turtle does not need to move, unless you decide for some reason that you want the turtle to move, which would ruin efficiency.

Code:
MFSU
Turtle> Ender Chest #2
Ender Chest #1

The ">" denotes the direction the turtle is facing. This specific setup is for using full batteries. The turtle grabs a battery from one of the chests (I usually use the #2 spot, as the enemy gate is down, and as such that is where my dead batteries go as well), and plops it into the MFSU (or MFE, or BatBox, or whatnot). It then sucks it out every so often (five to ten seconds) to compare it against an empty battery in its inventory. When they match, it outputs the battery downward, and grabs a new battery.

In your code, you want to have the turtle first check if it can suck a battery from the MFSU, and then check to see if it has a battery in hand. This means that, one reload from being unloaded in a chunk, it won't grab another battery when it already has one.
 

Flyin_spaghetti

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Oh I see, you say I should keep a main power storage to power the house. I thought I could power devices directly with a battery so I was planning to remove cables completely and use pneumatics which would make better use of the space as they can use the areas taken by covers. But now I see that devices cannot be powered by batteries directly so there will have to be at least some local storage devices. but I think I will prefer to use a single large storage with turtles or tubes, I dont think it will make much difference at this point. though turtles will be much more compact. My only concern is inability of the decharge rate of a battery to meet the needs of the whole house. that we will see...
 

Guswut

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I thought I could power devices directly with a battery so I was planning to remove cables completely and use pneumatics which would make better use of the space as they can use the areas taken by covers.

You should be able to do that, yes. I don't like that design, myself, but mostly as I don't use RE batteries for power movement.

My only concern is inability of the decharge rate of a battery to meet the needs of the whole house. that we will see...

You should look into (if you have GregTech) lithium batteries, or start going up to energy crystals and the like. They'll be able to input and output more energy per tick than an RE-battery can. The problem with that, though, is that often times things cannot use them for power.

Good luck!
 

NTaylor

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Jul 29, 2019
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hmm I like turtles as well but I'm not sure how practical it would be to wander around the infrastructure of the house where I will often go to add stuff. Though a persistent movement code will prevent them from causing problems if I encounter them, I tend to forget such things as their travel paths and might place something in their way when they are not there.

So in the current plan, when a battery is used up it will be summoned by the retriever and the filter will start sending out multiple batteries as it won't know its target can only take one. So they will be sent out and get stuck at the pipes till they are needed which will lag it like hell I assume. Reducing the timer frequency or placing a relay to return the excess batteries helps. But this is only with a small test system, I have no idea how will it be on a whole house. I might have to stick to turtles or abandon it all together.

(just to share here is the structure of the house: outer wall full block, air, inner wall cover, inside. It allows changing things without destroying and having to redesign the whole thing or looking ugly. outer block could be covers too for more space but I didn't want it to blow up completely if a creeper comes close, I will probably change it though.

You could combine CC and RP2 to overcome this problem have a turtle compare the state of the battery in the device to that of an empty one and when the battery is empty the turtle then sends a single redstone pulse which should mean that only one battery is sent if you set it up right.
 

Adonis0

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Jul 29, 2019
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Something for you to note, Filters pull a stack of items per pulse.
However, if you want only one item to be used, you can use transposers I believe, and they will pull single items at a time

Been a while since I've looked into transposers, so they may not be able to fulfill what you're wanting them to do..
 

Guswut

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Jul 29, 2019
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You could combine CC and RP2 to overcome this problem have a turtle compare the state of the battery in the device to that of an empty one and when the battery is empty the turtle then sends a single redstone pulse which should mean that only one battery is sent if you set it up right.

A BC gate would be a better way to go in that case, as it can read the status of the charging item inside a charging device.
 

NTaylor

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Jul 29, 2019
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A BC gate would be a better way to go in that case, as it can read the status of the charging item inside a charging device.

Correct however unless I am mistaken you only have one output port to work with in terms of where the battery can go in for each machine as such you need to add to and pull from the same slot BC pipes can't do that, however I haven't actually tried it so it may be able to read it from the side not sure however TBH not sure if a CC turtle could read it even from another side, I suppose a BC gate on the side of the device pulsing a RP 2 filter and retriever though that would be pretty much the same as using a computer and a computer is easy to make relatively early game only some iron and stone as opposed to needing the infrastructure to create the gates (I guess you would also need at least an iron gate.

Oh also @Adonis0

You can set the filter up to only pull a single item by putting only one in the GUI can you not?
 
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Adonis0

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No, the filter always pulls a stack on pulse as I understand it, putting items into a filter's interface just specifies what item to pull/allow through, not how many.

It was a different machine that pulled single items, and I think it's the transposer when it's adjacent to an inventory, but not entirely sure..
 

Damoklesz

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Jul 29, 2019
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A BC gate would be a better way to go in that case, as it can read the status of the charging item inside a charging device.

The gate reader upgrade from MiscPeripherals work for the IC2 storage devices too. I have the same system you described, except I don't pull the batteries for compairing, I use the gate reader upgrade to determine if they are full/empty and only pull then. My only problem is the enderchest bug, which I work around using item tesseracts and normal chests, so it's unfortunately not that neat.

Obviously the turtles are still not that useful for the no-cables, batteries-only idea.
 

WTFFFS

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A small thing I noticed you mentioned covers and creepers, afaik external covers (the ones on the inside of the edge line) inherit the blast resistance of the material they are made of so basalt covers when placed as the outside edge of the block space have the blast resistance of basalt.
 

PhilHibbs

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unless I am mistaken you only have one output port to work with in terms of where the battery can go in for each machine as such you need to add to and pull from the same slot BC pipes can't do that, however I haven't actually tried it so it may be able to read it from the side not sure however TBH not sure if a CC turtle could read it even from another side, I suppose a BC gate on the side of the device pulsing a RP 2 filter and retriever though that would be pretty much the same as using a computer and a computer is easy to make relatively early game only some iron and stone as opposed to needing the infrastructure to create the gates (I guess you would also need at least an iron gate.
A Sortron should be able to pull from any inventory slot from any side, but it can't insert. You'd have to have something else inserting the batteries into the appropriate side, and just program the Sortron to check the recharge slot for an empty battery. The advantage of this is that the Sortron doesn't need a RE-Battery, so you can program it to detect and extract empty Energy Crystals and Lapotronic Crystals without the extra expense of an item to compare against, and it could also pull fully charged Chainsaws, Electric Jetpacks, Gravisuit Chests, etc, as well. The downside is, you have to attach a Redpower computer to the Sortron and program it in Forth. Well, that's only a downside if you aren't up for that, personally I'm loving it.