The Mystery of the Gate and the Redstone Energy Cube

[Bigglesworth]

Evening fellow Beasts. Have an issue here, hope one of you smarter chaps can answer.

So I have some pulverizors hooked upto a redstone energy cell. Each pulv has a gate attached to it on the conductive line to send out a signal when they have room for emergy. I have them all connected to one red allow wire that leads to the Redstone Energy Cell and inverts the signal so the cell outputs energy when its getting no redstone signal and stops when it does (when the pulvs are thereby capped out on MJ)

I also have a gate hooked to the energy cell to let me know when the cell has room for more juice, and this goes off to the engine room to switch engine on or off. The problem is the gate that lets me know about the cells power levels is also sending a signal to the cell itself and screwing up when i want the cell to be sending power or not. So, how do I get into from the cell o send a signal to the engine without sending a signal to the cell itself? Or is there a better way?

Thanks

 

[zooqooo]

remove the inverter from the red alloy wire and use the redstone control tab to make it so that the cell responds to high redstone signal

 

[Abdiel]

The off switch for the cell is not needed. A cell connected to machinery by conduits will not send any energy when the machines' buffers are full. Therefore you can leave the cell always on (disable redstone control), and not have any problems.

If for some reason you still need redstone control, you will probably have to first lead the "cell is empty" signal further away via pipe wire.

 

[Juanitierno]

"The off switch for the cell is not needed. A cell connected to machinery by conduits will not send any energy when the machines' buffers are full"

i think he might be using conductive pipes, not conduits. In that case the cell will happily output 100MJ/t.

The easy answer is switch to conduits, then the whole network including the cell will regulate itself automatically.

Once youve done that, you can set the cell to ignore redstone signal and use the gate like your doing right now to turn on and off the engines.

Also, you can set the gate to emit pipe wire signal, then run some pipe wire to another gate which in turn emits a real redstone signal.

Red pipe wire signal will not trigger redstone behavior.

 

[Bigglesworth]

remove the inverter from the red alloy wire and use the redstone control tab to make it so that the cell responds to high redstone signal

Then the cell will start sending signal when the engine gate logic flips on. Thats my problem.

The off switch for the cell is not needed. A cell connected to machinery by conduits will not send any energy when the machines' buffers are full. Therefore you can leave the cell always on (disable redstone control), and not have any problems.

If for some reason you still need redstone control, you will probably have to first lead the "cell is empty" signal further away via pipe wire.

"The off switch for the cell is not needed. A cell connected to machinery by conduits will not send any energy when the machines' buffers are full"

i think he might be using conductive pipes, not conduits. In that case the cell will happily output 100MJ/t.

The easy answer is switch to conduits, then the whole network including the cell will regulate itself automatically.

Once youve done that, you can set the cell to ignore redstone signal and use the gate like your doing right now to turn on and off the engines.

Also, you can set the gate to emit pipe wire signal, then run some pipe wire to another gate which in turn emits a real redstone signal.

Red pipe wire signal will not trigger redstone behavior.

Thank you both for mentioning conduits and red pipe wire. I just found out about conduits, and my only issue with them is the 5% energy loss per machine (?). I may go that way in the end but if I can find another way that would be nice. I will be sure to check out this red pipe method!

 

[Bigglesworth]

Looks like the pipe wire is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks again

 

[Evil Hamster]

According to King Lemming it's 5% taken from the engine when it is pumped into the system, no further loss beyond that.

Certain machines (forestry & railcraft) like to drain energy even when they are idle, those are the only ones you need to worry about setting some kind of control on.

 

[Evil Hamster]

I could have misread what he said, but I've never seen loss from a cube. A system once charged will take exactly 400 for each liquid transposer operation from a cube. It does take some to charge the system but my understanding it isn't lost and will be used to keep a machine charged if the cube runs out.

 

[Golrith]

Once you've got a renewable energy source (e.g. tree farm), a 5% total power loss is nothing to worry about at all.

 

[MilConDoin]

I could have misread what he said, but I've never seen loss from a cube. A system once charged will take exactly 400 for each liquid transposer operation from a cube. It does take some to charge the system but my understanding it isn't lost and will be used to keep a machine charged if the cube runs out.

From another Thread the post of the King:

You are correct on the loss math - it's a flat 5%. However, this does mean you catch a double penalty for using a Cell in-line - the 5% loss happens twice. I'm not sure if that's really as horrible as it sounds. Let's be honest, BC power isn't that hard to make, and the inability to store it did factor into the initial balancing of it.

I'll likely revisit conduits to have more of a scaling power loss, such that very large networks will surpass 5 or even 10%, and very small ones will be < 1%. The trick is doing so in a computationally friendly manner.

This means: Cell -> Conduit = 5% loss.

 

[Evil Hamster]

Good info, thanks for correcting me!

I do agree that it's minor though. My cactus/reed farm combo fed from 1 MJ/t combined is more than enough to keep 2 36HP liquid boilers in different dimensions running at full steam with enough excess capacity to even start one up if I accidentally knock out the lever on the feed pipe and not notice until I return to my main base several hours later after the boiler has cooled to ~50C...

Losing 5 or 10% of essentially infinite free power is really not much of a concern.

 

[Bigglesworth]

Thanks for the added info, folks. Makes me think better on conduits. Right now my goal is efficiency, so even if I have infinite power vial nether lava, bio or my soon to be ultra solar array, its just a challenge to see how least wasteful I can be. But 5% is pretty small price to pay if it does something special I can't do with another method. It may even turn out to be more efficient as I don't know yet how much overhead power gets wasted in gold tubes with my developing setup. Thanks

 

[Bigglesworth]

Losing 5 or 10% of essentially infinite free power is really not much of a concern.

5% of infinite is infinite. So I'd be losing infinite power. (i kid)