Regulated item flow

[NerDee]

I have a plan that I just can't figure out how to get it to come together. I made a treefarm just for powering some engines (Wood>Furnace>Charcoal>Hobbyiest Steam Engine) but even with 6 engines they are not burning through the charcoal fast enough and I really have no use for the surplus Charcoal (making coal>coke) but really could use actual wood from the farm. So here is what I wanted to do.

1. Pump wood (and other products) into barrels (Just got this part configured then got stuck)
2. Pump wood out of the barrel at a regulated speed that matches the speed of how fast the engines burn through charcoal
3. Pump wood into furnace (This part is easy)
4. Pump Charcoal into engines evenly (I got this part figured out)

So basically I only need help with 2

Originally I was having all of the wood go into a furnace then into the engines as evenly as I knew how but eventually it formed a surplus (but did take a long time to do so, so not too hard to manage)

 

[lazaruz76]

One way I can think of off the top of my head is to place a sorting machine under the barrel you want to pull from, run tubes to the input of your generators then set the sorting machine to auto pull mode. This setup will regulate itself since it will back stuff itself till the gens have room for more.

 

[Chromium]

You could try a buildcraft gate on the engine set to, inventory empty = redstone signal. Then have that redstone signal trigger a transposer on the bottom of the barrel which will pull 1 wood from the barrel.

 

[NerDee]

Can you think of a way to pull one wood every 33.4 seconds (the rate at which it burns through charcoal) from the barrel? Is theres a block that will pull from an inventory with a redstone signal because I could set a timer to that speed and connect it to that block

 

[Chromium]

A transposer will pull one item.

 

[NerDee]

You could try a buildcraft gate on the engine set to, inventory empty = redstone signal. Then have that redstone signal trigger a transposer on the bottom of the barrel which will pull 1 wood from the barrel.

Transposer, sounds like the answer I'll try using one with a timer in a test world and see if it'll work

 

[AliveGhost]

Wack a timer down, filter or transposer, if a filter put one log in the filter, and stick a timer on the set timer.

Sent from my HTC Desire X using Tapatalk 2

 

[NerDee]

Well a transposer and redstone timer is going to do the trick for me, thanks for the help. I way over-thought this when the solution was so simple. Look for my map in the FTB Showoff section in the near future, I have some nice things I'm working on

 

[Siro]

You could use a gate at the engine to detect if there's space in inventory and then turn on a pipewire going to a gate under the barrel which could then be set to pulse on the pipewire signal, but this is notoriously unreliable in that the gates won't care if items are already on their way or not. You can address that by having it pulse only when inventory is empty. Or you can make a big loop of pipe going past your engines back to the barrels (it's more likely to fill the first inventories the items come to as long as they pipes are all right up against the inventories). Or you can use a bunch of diamond gates all along your pipe with at least two colors of pipewire with some And gates at either end so that you can detect if items are already traversing to the engine that sent the signal.

Or you could just build an ME network and store your charcoal there and just have an exporter on the engine set to charcoal. Or just an exporter set to charcoal on a router with a machine filter set to insert only to engines. Or you could try to set up clay golems.

 

[SkyBoy96]

One way I can think of off the top of my head is to place a sorting machine under the barrel you want to pull from, run tubes to the input of your generators then set the sorting machine to auto pull mode. This setup will regulate itself since it will back stuff itself till the gens have room for more.

Unless you want to build a time bomb in your world, NEVER make a system that relies on auto pull and back stuff. The auto pull is very fast, and it will start as soon as one slot is available, causing a constant increase in back stuffed items.

 

[hotblack desiato]

assuming you are playing ultimate:

set up each engine with an Applied Energistics Export Bus. this way, AE keeps the engines stocked with fuel. excess charcoal gets stored on a disk (should be a large one, like 64k, preformatted for charcoal).

 

[ratchet freak]

if you go the AE route set the export bus to craft and use an interface with a log to charcoal pattern on top of a furnace and import bus on its side

this way you only create any charcoal when actually needed

 

[NerDee]

What I did is had the a timer set to 16 seconds to pull 1 wood from the barrel in my stockroom using a transposer and sent it to a powered furnace to get turned into charcoal then it got sent out to pnumatic tubes that are connected to the engines so it would be sent to the nearest inventory with room. I calculated (once the engines are warmed up) that my array of engines burn through 1 coal every 16.667... seconds which is why I have the timer set to 16. I have a chest hooked up at the end of the tubing for extra charcoal. I have been running it for over a day now and seems to do what I wanted. Now all I have to do is remember to fill Arebortum with Humus every now and then for power

 

[DakkonB]

if you go the AE route set the export bus to craft and use an interface with a log to charcoal pattern on top of a furnace and import bus on its side

this way you only create any charcoal when actually needed

This.
An ME Export Bus set to the Single/Craft mode on each of your Hobby Steam Engines will keep them stocked with Charcoal.
An ME Interface on top of a furnace with a Wood -> Charcoal pattern, and some means to export the output from the furnace back into the AE network.

When a spot for a charcoal opens up in one of the engines, the AE network will request 1 charcoal. If no charcoal exists, the network will pull 1 wood and turn it into 1 charcoal, which will then be sent to the engine.

AE network adds lots of overhead, but more than likely you'll be using the AE network for lots of other things as well.

In the most simple case you, could set up just a mini-AE network specifically for this task and have one of the engines power the ME Controller. In that case the only AE blocks you'd need would be:
1) ME Controller
2) ME Interface (to place on a furnace)
3) ME Import Bus (to pull items out of furnace, if using a TE powered furnace you can replace this with an ME Interface)
4) ME Export Bus (placed on engine set to export charcoal and configured in Single/Craft mode)
5) ME Encoded Pattern (of 1 wood to 1 charcoal, place inside the ME Interface from #2)
6) ME Pattern Encoder (to encode the pattern for #5)
7) ME Storage Bus (connected to whatever container is storing your wood)

All of the above would maybe consume 10 Energy Units/tick? And 5 Energy Units = 1MJ. If you used more cabling it could use more Energy though. To expand it to more engines you'd need to increase #4 for each engine.

I don't think you'd need an ME Chest or an ME Drive with any storage, because you're really not storing excess items. When 1 charcoal is requested, it's being requested for an engine, and is going to be sent to that engine. So there's no excess or overflow anywhere.

The advantage of the above is that it is entirely self regulating and you should never have any problems with it.

 

[Hydra]

if you go the AE route set the export bus to craft and use an interface with a log to charcoal pattern on top of a furnace and import bus on its side

this way you only create any charcoal when actually needed

Personally I prefer level emitters that keep a certain amount of charcoal stocked. That way I always have some if I want to craft something and not have to wait for the furnaces to create it.

In my base I keep 50k wood stocked, the rest is burned to charcoal. Any charcoal over 50k gets burned in generators for UU-matter.

 

[NerDee]

Personally I prefer level emitters that keep a certain amount of charcoal stocked. That way I always have some if I want to craft something and not have to wait for the furnaces to create it.

In my base I keep 50k wood stocked, the rest is burned to charcoal. Any charcoal over 50k gets burned in generators for UU-matter.

That is a crazy idea, I'll have to work my way up to that