How can I make a "battery full" light?

1st Official Post

    Okay, so I'm playing on my SMP server, without any /give, and I just crafted myself 7 MFSU. My goal is to create a "battery room" where my solar panel and nuclear plant wiring meet. I'd LOVE to be able to have a switch that will always be on if all the MFSU are full, and off otherwise.


    Some ideas I had and why I don't think they'll work:


    • Use the Detector cable to notify me when the second to last MFSU stops sending eu. This isn't perfect, and it also fails once the last MFSU fills
    • Use the feature of MFSU where it sends EU when receiving a redstone signal if it's full. This isn't perfect because it only will work if there is some place for the EU to go that I can detect, but if whatever that is fills then it fails.

    Any ideas? I can't be the first person to try this out.

    I have a setup on one of my worlds that uses the detector cable and it works rather well.


    Solar Panel: (Incomming power) / :Glass Fibre: Wire :Glass Fibre: / (Detector cable) :Batbox: :Batbox: :Batbox: Battery array
    |
    Redstone gate
    |
    Indicator light



    This way when it's charging the detector cable shuts off the gate and puts the light out. When current stop going through the cable the gate is reversed and the light is on. It lets me know if my machines hooked to the batteries are finished producing. If there is more current going through the line than needed by the machine the light flashes. I have the same indicator setup between low/med/high/extreme voltage. Also have the same indicator setup for my reactors if they are running as well as a remote shut off.

    If I'm reading this correctly you are saying that the wire should connect to the detector cable. But wouldn't that only be on when power is flowing through? That shows that it definitely isn't full. But you can't easily show that it is full, as the solar array will stop generating power during the night, so it will look full during that time.


    I might just go ahead and set up a single water mill, as that should send power down the line no matter what unless it's full, then I just invert that signal.

    Throw in a wind generator farm instead. I have a few supplementing my solar flowers, neatly hidden in the tops of the RP2 rubber trees. Do that and you have a constant incomming flow.

    Quote from pizzadudecook

    Throw in a wind generator farm instead. I have a few supplementing my solar flowers, neatly hidden in the tops of the RP2 rubber trees. Do that and you have a constant incomming flow.

    I wanted something that took up a relatively small space, and considering I'm near level 80 or so, having a windmill near world height is too much.


    The water mill worked alright, although I needed to use RP2 stuff because I couldn't get a consistent flow through the cable with just a single water mill.

    I'm trying to do something similar, but instead of one light to indicate "charging" or not, I wanted to have a *series* of lights indicating the charge status of a series of batteries. When charging only, or under load only, it's able to detect an empty (or full) battery and switch to the next one in the line, but detectors do not have the ability to tell if a battery is actually full, just if current is flowing, so if you are in a situation where your power generation is higher than your load, it will never think the battery is 'full' and switch to the next one, or if your load is higher than your charge, it will never think the battery is empty and will not switch to the next full battery.


    What I'd love to see is a module you can stick on the side of the batbox/mfe/mfsu that triggers a redstone signal when battery is within %5 of full or empty... It would easily be able to tell what role it's playing by looking at the side of the box it's attached to: If it's on the output of a battery, trigger redstone on depletion (within a small margin of error - twice the output rating of the battery would be enough, to account for charging operations being done at the same time), if on one of the box's inputs, signal on completed charge (again, within a margin to account for the system being under load).


    Just make sure not to let the battery itself see the redstone signal. I've seen some interesting side effects of putting cable detectors right next to battery boxes.


    Such a module would allow me to make a system that would let me serial-charge an array of batteries, and would also allow me to build a power station capable of bringing backup generators online if all but the last battery are permitted to deplete themselves.


    Unless someone can think of a way to do that using the current cable detectors and cable splitters...

    I have (had) just such a setup in my 1.8.1 world. Unfortunately I was experimenting with water cooled reactors and lost the lot.... I'm going to be recreating it in my 1.0 world, but it's taking a bit of time to get going. I'll post on these forums when all is ready to go. Uses RP2 for simplicity, but you could replace it all with vanilla redstone if you wanted to take up the extra space.

    Yeah, that module is very much unlike the data you can get from any of the tools available.


    With redstone and the detector wires it wouldn't be too difficult to set up wiring that just cut off the output from a battery until the battery ahead of it ceases to output any power. So long as there is a constant drain this would never go off without them bottoming out.
    (detector wire -> redstone memory circuit -> redstone to battery as well as redstone memory for next battery.)


    While it is tempting to set this up in reverse for charging the batteries I think that going for the sloppier solution of just wiring them all up to the same power generation line in parallel will be more useful for detecting when you should turn the auxiliary power generation on- as the input is split between more boxes they will replenish slower and more quickly cycle to the final battery, meaning that the emergency signal will go off earlier.


    As for deciding when to shut the auxiliary off we would want detectors on all of the input wires. You could send the auxiliary generation through the top faces of the batteries to allow the simple wiring from constant power generation to remain simple. You would now have a way of detecting that a battery is full- as soon as there is no current going into three of the batteries you could reset their redstone memory to have them start discharging from the first box again and wait to see no current going into the final box and then shut down your auxiliary.



    I don't think there is anything about this setup (aside from my inconsistent naming of objects,) that wouldn't give the desired functionality. Might be ways to do it smaller but I was always more of a "get it working in the first place" kind of guy.

    • Official Post

    In the next release full storage devices emit redstone power, making this much simpler.

    Lesson 1: Watch over your crops....

    With the addition of the splitter cable, this only makes sense. Thanks Team! I'm going to hold off on redesigning my serial storage setup due to this impending change. I think I have a better setup idea with this change in mind.

    My setup using a batbox behind an MFSU, with the MFSU output going first through a detector cable, then through some transformers and back into the batbox. the detector cable output is inverted and run to the MFSU, so when there is no power on the line, the MFSU stores, and when the MFSU fills and over flows, it triggers the detector, which allows the MFSU to empty. The output of the MFSU, after the detector, before the transformers, goes into another MFSU, to be used by all my machines.The reactor power goes into the first MFSU, and the detector output also runs to the reactor, turning it off while the first MFSU empties into the second one.


    Edit: Here is the screen shot. closest to viewer is the batbox/MFSU pair, to the left is the transformers on the way back to batbox, and to the right is the inversion of the detector signal as well as the hole to the reactor in the background.



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