Unleashed 1.1.3: Properly automated Crushed Ice production?

[SmokeLuvr1971]

After building my laser room, I figured it was time to improve my force-engine power grid by throttling with Crushed Ice. Bred me some Glacial bees and threw 'em in an Alveary. Found a video on crushed ice / squeezer automation [

and also found some problems the vid author chose not to disclose. His setup only works if you have 4 ice shards every time the clock cycles. If you have less shards than required, the squeezer will eventually fill up with snowballs.

With a max sustainable alveary [4 frames] and max bee production stats, I'm getting 1-2 shards per bee-tick, per alveary. With 4 alvearies, I can set the fail-safe delay to a bee-tick [27.5 sec]...which still seems really long.

Anyone else come up with a solution that's more fire-and-forget?

 

[rhn]

Forget the whole clock thing. What you want is to add an export bus to a router and a export bus to the squeezer. Export snowballs to the router. Set the router to insert into squeezer(machine upgrade), but set it to insert into slot xx(you have to experiment a bit with which numerical slot in the router is which slot in the squeezer). This way the router will keep one slot stocked, but only one slot. Now set the other export bus to export the shards directly into the squeeer. This way there will always be 1 stack(and only one) of snowballs ready for your shards.

Edit: for the squeezer the slot0 is the upper left slot.

Because a picture is worth a thousand words:

This is somewhat the same problem. I wanted to automate making scented panels in a carpenter, but if I ordered an entire alveary worth of panels it could potentialy fill the carpenters inventory up with wood or something, leaving no room for the last needed material. Those 3 routers then insert Pollen, Jelly and Wax into 3 respective slots. Now when I call for some to be crafted, all the interface does is add the wood to the carpenter.
Just change the interface to an export bus, remove 2 routers, replace carpenter with squeezer and its the same setup.

 

[SmokeLuvr1971]

That is simply marvelous!!! Exactly the type of solution I was looking for. Thanks for sharing.

Side note: I got to learn about hopper clocks!

Edit: got 'er up and running within minutes AND noticed a fully-powered squeezer outputting to a powered liquiduct will have an empty tank before the next batch finishes processing. So no worries over losing crushed ice because there's no more room in the squeezer's internal tank [there's a note about this on one of the wiki pages].

Also used this setup on my phosphor to lava squeezer and may incorporate it into the carpenter 'cause I just noticed it's inventory spaces are full [still processing, but full]

 

[rhn]

Seems a lot of people have forgotten about the routers amazing properties. Being able to insert evenly into multiple machines, extract from multiple machines, insert into specific slots etc.
I personally use them greatly in conjunction with AE: Carpenters, Squeezers, Fermenters, Centrifuges, Coke ovens, blast furnaces, Recyclers and the list goes on. I love how you can have multiple Squeezers for example and if they arent fast enough, just slap a couple more squeezers on. No need for more automation.
And yeah, I actually think the first time I got the idea of this setup using the specific slots was for the Phosphor->Lava process.

 

[Adonis0]

Something of note, AE has changed the way it exports items for a pattern in a AE interface in version r13.a
You shouldn't have this problem in the later iterations of AE

Planned Crafting Changes

• Support for Multiple Patterns / Job splitting for crafting. Done rv13.a
• Support for more then one pattern per item, with priority.
• Display meesage about low space if there is no room.
• Output Sets of Items for External Crafting ( send 4 gold / 4 iron; repeat. instead of 128 gold, then 128 iron ) - Done rv13.a

http://ae-mod.info/Requested-Features/

 

[SmokeLuvr1971]

Hmmm...can't seem to get a router to recognize the Carpenter it's directly attached to, this is with the machine filter upgrade installed [if that matters]. Can't find "Carpenter" listed and, going by the slot number list from here : http://ftbwiki.org/Carpenter, can't get any items moved by cycling through each machine in the list. Also tried entering the text "Carpenter" and cycling through the slots. Nothing seems to work. Any ideas?

Edit: there's no redstone signal interfering. Any the only 2 machines with inventories directly touching are the carpenter and this router. It's spaced at least 1-block distant from any other inventory-capable block

Edit: weird...went into creative to limit the amount of machines router could see. With only a single router and carpenter in world, carpenter comes up as "factory.1". Using this back in my world, I noticed the slot numbers are off by alot
Slot above item being crafted = 9
Output slot = 10
Bucket/cell slot = 11
Upper left inventory slots [first three] = 12, 13, 14

I got the info I needed so I'm done screwing around with figuring this out.

 

[rhn]

Hmmm...can't seem to get a router to recognize the Carpenter it's directly attached to, this is with the machine filter upgrade installed [if that matters]. Can't find "Carpenter" listed and, going by the slot number list from here : http://ftbwiki.org/Carpenter, can't get any items moved by cycling through each machine in the list. Also tried entering the text "Carpenter" and cycling through the slots. Nothing seems to work. Any ideas?

Edit: there's no redstone signal interfering. Any the only 2 machines with inventories directly touching are the carpenter and this router. It's spaced at least 1-block distant from any other inventory-capable block

Edit: weird...went into creative to limit the amount of machines router could see. With only a single router and carpenter in world, carpenter comes up as "factory.1". Using this back in my world, I noticed the slot numbers are off by alot
Slot above item being crafted = 9
Output slot = 10
Bucket/cell slot = 11
Upper left inventory slots [first three] = 12, 13, 14

I got the info I needed so I'm done screwing around with figuring this out.

Yeah, for some reason the Forestry(and other) machines names are a bit weird in the Routers machine upgrade interface. I suppose it refers to some internally used name.
Notable ones are:
Carpenter is factory.1
Centrifuge is factory.2
Fermenter factory.3
Squeezer factory.5
Frame Housing tileextrabeealveary

And slot numbers aren't always logical.
It takes a bit of experimentation to get used to them.

 

[SmokeLuvr1971]

Again, thanks for sharing what you know.

I knew about the frame housing from previous searching [and experience]. This is really the first time I've started to use the Router somewhat extensively in Unleashed. In Ultimate, I recall the Router correctly displaying Forestry's machine names. For me, getting the machines to work together and do something is fun. Figuring out how the individual machines work/can be interacted with...not so much and a time-sink.