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[cecilhowe]

So the last few days I have been messing around with all the goodies coming up in 1.5 and I have overly engineered a few things.  My most recent engineering project is an inefficient, but completely automatic, modular reed farm.  The reed farm harvests every morning at day break, and sends the reeds through piping to a chest.  Here are some screenshots of it:

This is a reed module, it potentially can grow 32 reeds before harvest, but rarely does.  The upside to this design is that reed is rarely lost.  The pistons push the reeds into the glass pane which then drop into the water and eventually make their way into the hoppers.  Top screen is right before harvest, bottom screen is mid harvest.





The harvesting is controlled by a daylight detector powered pulse limiter.  When the day begins it powers the harvesting pistons, and at night it resets itself.  You could run this circuit to harvest at both day and night, or at regular intervals throughout the day but I like to give the reed time to grow.



The reeds travel through the hopper piping to the dropper vertical piping.  It is a lot of hoppers, that can easily be replaces by moving water or storage carts.  The orange wool is the wiring for the vertical pipes, and the purple wool is an valve control function.  Flip the switch and it will stop the hopper that feeds into the vertical pipe from pushing items through.  If your valve is shut then reeds don't travel to the surface, but still collect in the pipes.  This is a nice function because you can just have it collecting reed forever, then open the valve and let it do its thing all at once and go AFK, instead of letting the vertical pipe lag your game up while your playing.



A close up of the valve control feature.



This is where the reeds end up, and the switch is the valve control.



Here is a picture from the top and back of the modules, to get a good understanding of how big the modules are.  You can tile them pretty seamlessly, and you can put them as far in the sky or as deep underground as you want.  They are all self contained, and can be easily retrofitted to utilize a different item delivery system.





At any rate I am sure that there is a better, more efficient way to do this.  But overly engineering these things is always a lot of fun.  The introduction of hoppers, droppers, comparators, redstone blocks, and everything else is going to bring back the good ol' days of mega-sized, mostly useless machines.  Like people building bedrock to skylimit cactus farms that automatically turn into green dye.  I am excited about it!

[sosladms]

Cool design. I was working on my existing farm to automatically sort my items and transport into my storage area.




Items are transported to this location by item elevator and water stream. Hopper is connected with comparator and simple clock. Below hopper there is dispenser with full inventory.



4 slots of inventory is filled with filler item. It let you put only 1 item for what you want to sort and if item reaches 3 dispenser start to shoot item and hopper puts items into the dispenser than stop at 1.




Dispenser shoot items into the water stream than transported to storage area.

[cecilhowe]

I am curious how you keep the hopper from emptying out completely.  How do you do that?

[rodabon]

cecilhowe, on 09 February 2013 - 12:16 AM, said:

I am curious how you keep the hopper from emptying out completely.  How do you do that?

I believe he's using the system or a variation of it that is explained fairly well in this thread:
http://www.minecraft...a-hopper-chain/

[sosladms]

cecilhowe, on 09 February 2013 - 12:16 AM, said:

I am curious how you keep the hopper from emptying out completely.  How do you do that?

Dispenser below the hopper is full with 9 full stacks of 1 item, so items are stay in the hopper. When hopper reaches threshold, which is 3 item in the first slot, comparator trigger redstone clock and power dispenser. While dispenser shoots out item, hopper put items in the dispenser. If first slot in the hopper remain only 2 item, redstone clock stops but dispenser shoots out one more item and stop remain only 1 item like screenshot above.

[Packerdan]

I started a world where I'm trying to design a bunch of auto-farms, adjust SethBlings sorter to work in the new update (Adjustments since 13w01a) and hook up the daylight sensor to a counter and have it harvest every 5 or 6 days (Whenever most is fully grown)
Currently just building all the farms, and prepping for 1.5.

But ya, any 100% automatic farm is going to be impractically hard to build in survival with the exception of a basic wheat/carrot/potato, but those aren't even 100% auto.

[cecilhowe]

Packerdan, on 09 February 2013 - 05:44 PM, said:

I started a world where I'm trying to design a bunch of auto-farms, adjust SethBlings sorter to work in the new update (Adjustments since 13w01a) and hook up the daylight sensor to a counter and have it harvest every 5 or 6 days (Whenever most is fully grown)
Currently just building all the farms, and prepping for 1.5.

But ya, any 100% automatic farm is going to be impractically hard to build in survival with the exception of a basic wheat/carrot/potato, but those aren't even 100% auto.

Well fully automatic cactus, reed, and melon farms are pretty practical.  You don't really have to chain the hoppers together like I do in this build, water pipes go a long way in conjunction with hoppers and droppers.  It is all about play style really, though.

How do you do your multiple day clock?  I know almost nothing about redstone, and that piques my interest.  I just went with a once a day harvest because I would like to maximize the amount of harvests while I am in the area of the farm.  I feel like if you go far away enough then a multiple day counter is going to cause a lot of waiting.

[Zaibach]

Off the top of my head if I was to guess, it would be a daylight sensor hooked up to a set of four pistons that pushed a combination of glass and "something else" in a circle. Glas doesn't conduct a redstone current so the system would only trigger when the "something else" moved into the propper position.

................
.
........
...........

(if furnaces were pistons, just needs the right delay timing)

Problem is that would stay in the on position until the next day but I'm sure an OR gate and an RSNOR latch would work to pulse the system once on the given day. Toss a NOT in there to reset the RSNOR when the system shifted the next day and I would think it would be gravy from there. There is probably an easier way but so much almost asleep.

Edit: Actually ignore that RSNOR/NOT because I'm a big dumb. Just split the signal from the timer to the OR gate and throw some delay repeaters on one side. That way the first signal turns the OR gate on and the second delayed signal turns it back off. No need for Latching or Resetting.

Now, Back to Sleep!

Edit:Edit: Replace every reference to OR with XOR

On the plus side I was thinking about trying to throw one of these together maybe I'll give it a shot tomorrow. Now, back to sleep again!

[Packerdan]

Basically a series of delays and pistons,
unfortunately I just realized that this would not work, because the daylight sensor emits a constant signal, (Input has to be quick, button) but I'll mess around and find something that will make the signal brief.

[Packerdan]

Ok, that didn't take long, hook this up at the beginning, (Daylight Sensor instead of Lever) and You'll have a working counter with a daylight sensor. All of this can probably be compacted significantly, I really don't worry about space when building redstone contraptions.
Really can't wait for 1.5!
Also having trouble making a 100% auto Melon/Pumpkin, I can't get a harvesting system that works off 1 input without tons of repeaters.

[cecilhowe]

Packerdan, on 10 February 2013 - 04:02 AM, said:

Also having trouble making a 100% auto Melon/Pumpkin, I can't get a harvesting system that works off 1 input without tons of repeaters.

I have come up with a few designs for the melon farm, but none that have a good harvest rate that are pretty small; melon slices just shoot everywhere.  The closest I have gotten has a four block wide water lane in between two rows of melons.  It takes up a lot of space.

My next big issue is a vertical item pipe that doesn't use pistons, and is flawless.  I use this design: http://www.minecraft...ical-item-pipe/



It is loud and laggy in tall pipes, but It doesn't clog up nearly as easily as a pipe made without pistons.  The only time it clogs up is if the chest at the top fills up, and begins to break the flow in a chain descending from the top dropper.  It's fast though.



The vertical pipe helps send a stack of items in the right chest through this piping system to the left chest in less than a minute.

[Zaibach]

OK XOR gate was good in principle but pulsed twice once when activated and again when deactivated. So I tried directly linking the pistons to the output levels from the light detector directly to allow it to handle the piston timing. That only used one redstone inverter 4 repeaters and the 4 pistons. It seemed to work well but could be jammed if people used the /time command.

Then thanks to the miracle of the internet I was introduced to edge triggers. Which solved all the problems. Now it can be set to trigger on only one edge which solved the issue with the XOR varient incrementing twice a day, at dawn and dusk. As well as the potential jamming issue when you let the daylight detector controll the piston timing directly.

Giving you essentially three full days of useful growth time. Just replace the second redwool block with glass for 6 days or alternate glass blocks and wool to have it trigger every other day.





Replace the Switch with the light detector with redstone length and logic for desired time of day.
Replace the output going to the the redstone lamp with a second edge trigger to pulse the output.

Also bonus triggering at just around dusk, is that's usually when people abuse the /time command to skip night. Which means it should still increment allowing it to still keep fairly accurate count of the "daylight" cycles.

[cecilhowe]

Packerdan, on 10 February 2013 - 04:02 AM, said:

Also having trouble making a 100% auto Melon/Pumpkin, I can't get a harvesting system that works off 1 input without tons of repeaters.

Not sure if this counts as a ton of repeaters, but it is the best modular design I could come up with.

[Packerdan]

cecilhowe, on 11 February 2013 - 06:22 AM, said:

Not sure if this counts as a ton of repeaters, but it is the best modular design I could come up with.

Looks nice, I'd like to find a way to increase the drop collection (Looks like quite a few are wasted there)
On a side note I finally got the new snapshot (Thanks to the Curse Client feature) and built a transfer station, from the water into a minecart and then the minecart gets shot off to the collection point (Haven't made that yet) If anyone is interested I could post some pictures, but its pretty overly-complicated.

[ShawnPhillips]

Packerdan, on 13 February 2013 - 07:30 PM, said:

Looks nice, I'd like to find a way to increase the drop collection (Looks like quite a few are wasted there)

try using sticky pistons to push a block into the melon. It works much better on my auto-harvest reed farms then using just normal pistons.

[cecilhowe]

Packerdan, on 13 February 2013 - 07:30 PM, said:

Looks nice, I'd like to find a way to increase the drop collection (Looks like quite a few are wasted there)
On a side note I finally got the new snapshot (Thanks to the Curse Client feature) and built a transfer station, from the water into a minecart and then the minecart gets shot off to the collection point (Haven't made that yet) If anyone is interested I could post some pictures, but its pretty overly-complicated.

Yeah sticky piston "blades" works the best, and I've since changed this design accordingly.  The biggest issue is that when a melon grows, sometimes two vines will attach to it and the second one will not grow a new melon.  But this design is small enough, and very modular, that you could link five or six in a small area to increase the drop rate.