Red Power Automatic Wheat Energy Farm

[qsmithy]

Spoiler

I'm trying to make an automatic wheat energy farm, but I am having trouble with some of the mechanisms. I'm sure the way I'm doing it now is a little over complicated, so I'll explain it in stages.

The first stage is on the ground level, about 20-30 blocks above the roof of my lab, and about 33-43 blocks from the floor of my lab. The wheat is gathered and the seeds replanted via Thaumcraft Golems, which are stationed at the four chests near the four corners of a 17x16-ish wheat farm. The items from the four chests are piped out, and into a center golden chest for processing.

The progressing begins with a filter hooked to a timer to dispense uncolored items into the main pneumatic tube system. From there, it travels a pretty far distance to a Sorting Machine. This is where one of my problems begins: it doesn't see the Sorting Machine as an output, despite it having full power. I tried to hook a chest up to it, then having something eject them again, but the built-in inventory screen gets clogged. The Sorting Machine is powered by two columns of a 1x10 Thermopile Bluetricity mini-energy farm using three columns of water, and one column of lava. From there, it's supposed to travel a pretty far distance back near where it started from so the wheat can be distribute properly. The items have to travel a pretty far distance because of the size of my lab, and how I am designing it. I am aware of Magtubes, but they require accelerators, which require Bluetricity. I am worried that if I somehow get wires to the accelerators from the Thermopiles, that it will take a lot of the energy away needed for the Sorting Machine. The Sorting Machine is set to it's default settings, and will sort a stack of wheat and seeds at a time. The wheat is colored red, while the seeds are colored white. From there, the wheat and seeds are separated via painted pneumatic tubes. The seeds are scrapped via placement into a chest, and piped out via redstone engines into a void pipe.... (I couldn't figure out how to do it with Red Power).

The final step is turning the wheat into EU. The wheat has two outputs, the main output is to the left side of a Fermenter, while the 2nd output it blocked by a restriction pipe so wheat will only go there if the fermenter is full. I sometimes have trouble with this, as sometimes the wheat will somehow go into the slot for empty cells or cans. Using IndustrialCraft pipes, that never happens, so I might have a transfer point to them to prevent mishaps (unless you can tell me how to fix that). The extra wheat goes into a chest (which I may replace with a barrel) with dirt next to a automatic crafting table. The automatic craft table is set with a timer to dispense one unit of compost every 5 or so minutes. The compost is piped via IndustrialCraft pipes into the back of a fermenter.

From there, it is very basic. There is an aquatic accumulator under the fermenter in a 3x3 hole of water to give it infinite water. The fermenter is powered via a Energy Tesseract (Energy cells in the picture because this is my test world) which is hooked up to a 17x18 solar panel energy farm and bluetricty engines to convert it into MJ. From there, Biomass is pumped out via liquidtucts, and into a Still. The Still is also powered by an Energy Tesseract hooked up to the solar power energy farm. The now Bio-fuel is pumped out via liquiducts and into a Diseal Generator. The Diseal Generator is right next to a MFSU.

 

[neiromaru]

You can use transposers instead of filters for the first step, they're cheaper and will do that same thing.

The sorting machine needs to be triggered with a timer, or set to one of it's self triggering modes.

RP2 tubes are notoriously bad at putting items into the right slots of machines. If there's room just stick in a relay and a stone pipe right before it goes into the machine.

Really though since this is such a simple set up it might be easier for you to just use wooden pipes to pull the stuff out of the chests, gold pipes to make it go fast, and a diamond pipe to sort them. You can also use a diamond pipe (or an insertion pipe if you have them) to replace the overflow functionality of the restriction tube.

 

[Eversor]

tubes should not be used for autocrafting and machinaries cause they work really bad. I've made it with builcraft pipes and easy redstone logic. I'm having trouble uploading an immage of that cause i'm noob but i'll try to explain it:
diamond pipe from combine split wheat and seeds
*seeds go into a chest, put a wooden pipe with a gate on the farm (care this wooden pipe must not be connected with anything else except the farm) , and tell it to send redstones signal when seeds < 25% ; put another wooden pipe with an autarchic gate on the seed's chest into farm and tell it to send energy pulse when redstone signal on ( wich is the same redstone signal you send from the first wooden pipe, you can send the redstone signal with a jacket wire); third and last wooden pipe on the seed's chest prevent the chest overflow, put another autarchic gate on it and tell it to send energy pulse when inventory is full (i personally void the seeds ). this is all you need to automate your farm and prevent overflow.
*to costantly send wheat into the fermenter without overflow you need to do pretty much the same thing ( send redstone signal when resources <25%, energy pulse when redstone signal on, etc). same for the compost, when redstone signal on-> energy pulse -> item getting extracted from auto crafting table)

 

[Omicron]

tubes should not be used for autocrafting and machinaries cause they work really bad.

I'm not sure where you got that idea from, but it's pretty much completely false... unless you are in the camp of "anything that displays any graphics at all is an invention of the devil so I'll just use applied energistics for everything".

Redpower's tubes have a built-in logic that makes them work different from Buildcraft pipes. A design that works with one won't work with the other, but both do the job perfectly fine in a design that takes advantage of its strengths. In fact, tube systems tend to scale up better and allow repurposing existing tubes for intelligent bidirectional auto-routing.

Don't make me dig up my 1.2.5 world with my 30x80x6 one-size-fits-all autoprocessing and autocrafting factory made with 90% pneumatic tubes

 

[Eversor]

well, i did say a bullshit by saying that they do not work well with machinaries, but i still think that with autocrafting table they suck unless you prove me wrong. whenever i tried to use tubes for autocrafting table it ended up putting stuff in the wrong position, no matter what the input side is.

 

[Omicron]

That's because the autocrafting table used to be a hacked together piece of weirdness Very few things aside from Buildcraft itself worked properly with it. Its been majorly reworked recently though (early 1.6), including such fun features as auto-balancing resources across the recipe and such. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u99rXpf2OPs at 15:05 )

In 1.4.7 and before, using Redpower, you'd go ahead and exploit the ability of the thing to pull from adjacent inventories. Instead of inserting into the table directly, insert into an adjacent chest. That's guaranteed to never bug out regardless of what other mods you use.