Heavy Wire Battery Switching

[Mullematsch]

Does anyone have a battery switching design for heavy wire which does not get stuck all the time?

I have been using this from Saturnus and it gets stuck frequently. 

Interestingly enough the above design only gets stuck if my solar panel battery bank is empty but I still have power in my other battery bank + control unit.

It's really weird, I am not sure how much of it breaking is my wonky power system or the design itself. 

I'll add the save if anyone wants to play around with it in my world. 

hovel2 .sav

 

[mathmanican]

4 hours ago, Mullematsch said:

battery switching ... which does not get stuck all the time

I have yet to see one. Each time one is posted, it later is shown to be broken. Does resetting it every day with a clock fix the issue, at least once a day? 

[flapee]

3 hours ago, mathmanican said:

is shown to be broken

@mathmanican do your worst best  :

[mathmanican]

42 minutes ago, flapee said:

do your worst best 

@Mullematsch you now have one. Let us know if this fixes it.

[Mullematsch]

The design for conductive wire works great for me. Just using two not gates of one smart battery and it only gets stuck if you reload the world mid switching.

The one for heavy watt wire is giving me the trouble. I am not sure if it's the design itself or if I am making some other mistake with the way I got it set up. 

5 hours ago, mathmanican said:

I have yet to see one. Each time one is posted, it later is shown to be broken. Does resetting it every day with a clock fix the issue, at least once a day? 

Clock works but obviously not ideal. Should also be able to use switch design - transformers (5) - battery - transformers (5) - output 

Use the battery in the middle to detect if it is stuck and reset it. Was hoping there is a consistent design out there. 

 

[Sheo]

Got two builds, depending on what you need. For powerplant two completly load 40k batteries, or another build to keep your consumers up without interuptions which can be loaded by simple 1k wires w/o overloading. Using both in every game. No need of heavy wires all over the base, just one single 1k wire to keep every consumer up.

[Mullematsch]

1 hour ago, Sheo said:

Got two builds, depending on what you need. For powerplant two completly load 40k batteries, or another build to keep your consumers up without interuptions which can be loaded by simple 1k wires w/o overloading. Using both in every game. No need of heavy wires all over the base, just one single 1k wire to keep every consumer up.

Please post both, always like to see different designs.

I am (like you) using a normal wire as the mainline for all power. I take power of that wire with the standard 2 batteries, 2 not gates to a conductive wire design. I have been trying to use heavy wire for all the aquatuners (8) and all the electrolyzers + pumps for 50 dups. That is the design which is giving me trouble. 

 

So 1kw main line - heavy wire switch design - 20kw output to aquatuners / oxygen production. 

[nakomaru]

1 hour ago, Mullematsch said:

So 1kw main line - heavy wire switch design - 20kw output to aquatuners / oxygen production. 

Then why did you say:

10 hours ago, Mullematsch said:

switch design - transformers (5) - battery - transformers (5) - output 

I see no need for these additional transformers or double switch. 

Do what you've always done but just put heavi-watt instead.

Here I used @flapee's automation circuit.

[Mullematsch]

1 hour ago, nakomaru said:

Then why did you say:

I see no need for these additional transformers or double switch. 

Do what you've always done but just put heavi-watt instead.

Here I used @flapee's automation circuit.

Thanks - I'll test it tomorrow and report back. Might also just be an issue with all the dups, late game plus super speed.

Five transformers so that those would not be the bottleneck. And the transformers in general to push the power into the battery(ies) and use the automation output to detect if the design got stuck. Just a ghetto way to get the design potentially working - probably better in that case to just use a clock to reset it every 30 seconds. That's not my normal setup, just brainstorming how to fix it if all those battery switch designs get stuck with heavy watt wire. 

[nakomaru]

For what it's worth, I tested this design with power outages and it is able to reboot fine. Please try this design with no transformers. Only use transformers on your generator side to give your main line more wattage. You can use 10 to support 40kW bursts etc.

Flapee's automation design may indeed fix the reload bug, but it's very hard to test especially as I've never experienced it. The "unnecessary" OR gate might be holding on to the bit state of the middle wire during reload.

[abud]

May I ask, what function of OR gate in the right?

I can see the left OR is to force it evaluated after battery output signal evaluation complete. I'm wrong about this?

Edit: and to be evaluated at the same time as NOT gate

[Mullematsch]

1 minute ago, nakomaru said:

For what it's worth, I tested this design with power outages and it is able to reboot fine. Please try this design with no transformers. Only use transformers on your generator side to give your main line more wattage. You can use 10 to support 40kW bursts etc.

Flapee's automation design may indeed fix the reload bug, but it's very hard to test especially as I've never experienced it. The "unnecessary" OR gate might be holding on to the bit state of the middle wire.

 

Forum coming in clutch again. Not getting stuck, looking great. 

I am curious how you guys deal with the the issue that transformers eventually become the bottleneck. 

Can't have more than five or you damage the wire, however you mentioned having 10, how do you set that up? 

If you have 2x generators - batteries - transformers -> mainline, then you can't use one central control unit to turn on/off all generators.

 

Also does anyone know how the game decides where to take the power from if twice you have transformers feeding the mainline? 

This here being input one for mainline, which bit messy sorry , but lets say coal, solar, natural gas. (Pic 1)

Then you have something similar with coal, petroleum generators. Again transformers connected to the mainline. (Pic 2)

Is the power draw split evenly?  Do you waste power this way? 

 

Actually, bit of a ramble here but thinking about this:

Pics are my set up mostly (bit here added in debug for testing). Control unit are the smart batteries in picture one. Those turn on all the generators, also the petroleum and coal of Picture 2:

Now if Coal or Petroleum kicks in it fills up battery bank two and thus not the control unit. However if the battery bank 2 is (half) full, you can use a smart battery output to turn off the transformers of the control unit -> mainline. 

I guess this still does not allow you to detect if the five transformers can then keep up with all power usage on the mainline... Especially if you are producing more than 20kw on the wire. The batteries would not lose charge but you would still have power issues. That is the last problem I am trying to work out currently. 

 

[flapee]

30 minutes ago, abud said:

May I ask, what function of OR gate in the right?

I can see the left OR is to force it evaluated after battery output signal evaluation complete. I'm wrong about this?

Edit: and to be evaluated at the same time as NOT gate

Yep, left OR is indeed used for exact timing with NOT gate, the output of unused right OR gate can be used to turn on/off the generators

[snoozer]

I noticed a bug when building a powershutoff. If you build a powershutoff first and an automationwire afterwards the ps turns off, if you build it the other way around the ps stays active, despite the red automation wire, until a signalchange happens. I wonder if that's the reason why switching batteries sometimes get stuck on load.

[nakomaru]

1 hour ago, Mullematsch said:

Can't have more than five or you damage the wire, however you mentioned having 10, how do you set that up? 

You must be overthinking this.

Here's 5.

Spoiler

Here's another 5.

Spoiler

Here's another 5 from the solar array.

Spoiler

That's a 60kW main line now.

I don't know how the game picks transformer drain order. It seems kind of related to build order but probably not. Or probably not after reload.

[Mullematsch]

4 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

You must be overthinking this.

Probably... but if you set it up this way, you can't use automation of a central control unit for all different power sources right?

Lets say you want to use solar first. Then if smart batteries are below x hydrogen -> coal -> petroleum. The way I usually do that is generators - control unit - transformers - main line. 

If the transformers are the bottleneck though, you can't just double this design or the smart battery logic won't work. I always need to feed all power into the control unit and then the transformers are the problem. 

Transformers in bold to indicate its always the same five - control unit to mainline. 

[nakomaru]

13 minutes ago, Mullematsch said:

Probably... but if you set it up this way, you can't use automation of a central control unit for all different power sources right?

If you want more than 20kW on the main line you cannot precisely control which station gets used.

If you are happy with 20kW on the main line, you can use automation from your solar array to disconnect the substations from the main line, and enable them when the solar batteries get lower. Tier 1 controls tier 2, tier 2 controls tier 3.

Or a 40kW compromise: always petrol and solar. if petrol is out, connect the hydrogen substation, or whatever.

Or if transformers are consumed in round robin style, only connect 1 transformer to your coal gen, 20 from solar, 10 to your petrols, 5 to your hydrogen. Something like that could balance your preferred consumption. (I'm not sure if it's round robin.)

[Mullematsch]

3 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

If you want more than 20kW on the main line you cannot precisely control which station gets used.

If you are happy with 20kW on the main line, you can use automation from your solar array to disconnect the substations from the main line, and enable them when the solar batteries get lower. Tier 1 controls tier 2, tier 2 controls tier 3.

Or a 40kW compromise: always petrol and solar. if petrol is out, connect the hydrogen substation, or whatever.

Yeah, that is what I was thinking as well. 

I have just been wondering if there is a way to have unlimited power mainline plus all power sources controlled via smart batteries of a central control unit. 

So I am assuming with your setup, you detect if you solar bank gets low and use that turn on other transformers? Guess instead of smart battery logic for each power source it might be better to have all generators activate (after solar) and then set conditions to always have hydrogen / natural gas above x, only use coal if petroleum below x etc.. 

[nakomaru]

@Mullematsch Actually, now that I'm looking closely, it actually does seem like it's transformer build order. I rebuilt them on a hunch a long time ago, and currently my solar transformers are jumping around and consuming power. My NG transformers which I build after are just idle.

6 minutes ago, Mullematsch said:

So I am assuming with your setup, you detect if you solar bank gets low and use that turn on other transformers?

I don't use automation to disable my NG station cause this was working out.

This is reasonable to do if you are happy with 20kW or solar+20kW like above. I would use a battery from the solar array to turn off a switch at my NG station. Be sure if you do this you do not disable the transformers, but disable a power switch between the transformers and the main line. Otherwise you will destroy 20000J each time they turn off.

The batteries at each station will control the generators themselves.

[Mullematsch]

5 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

@Mullematsch Actually, now that I'm looking closely, it actually does seem like it's transformer build order. I rebuilt them on a hunch a long time ago, and currently my solar transformers are jumping around and consuming power. My NG transformers which I build after are just idle.

I don't use automation to disable my NG station cause this was working out.

This is reasonable to do if you are happy with 20kW or solar+20kW like above. I would use a battery from the solar array to turn off a switch at my NG station. Be sure if you do this you do not disable the transformers, but disable a power switch between the transformers and the main line. Otherwise you will destroy 20000J each time they turn off.

Maybe there is hidden code prioritizing solar power over other sources. Not sure but I have seen the same before.

Also it is actually kinda possible to have mainline above 20kw plus using a central smart battery control station.

This is how I have set it up before and seemed to work well:

Solar + Generators ( minus whatever turns on last (let's say natural gas)) - control unit - transformers - mainline

Then control unit would be your smart batteries:

Battery 1: Turn on Hydrogen if below 85

Battery 2: Turn on Coal if below 65 

...

...

Last Battery: Lowest setting (below 20) connect to natural gas (whatever turns on last) and those generators could be directly on the mainline. They would only kick in if the control unit is emptyish and not able to keep up = power is required. 

The generators would also only be active until the batteries start filling up again.

With that setup, it is possible that you have all the resources (coal, Hydrogen, petroleum) but the transformers cannot keep up and that then turns on the natural gas power but it will supply over the 20kw at least.

Nice talk btw 

[nakomaru]

Ten seconds of my NG gens:

Ten seconds of my solar gens:

Lots more activity on my solar. I do not think it has anything to do with the generator, but the build order or other hidden arbitrary ordering (X/Y position etc).

I prefer to separate the stations and keep a higher maximum wattage even if it means I waste gas, which apparently I don't.

[Mullematsch]

1 minute ago, nakomaru said:

Ten seconds of my NG gens:

Ten seconds of my solar gens:

Lots more activity on my solar. I do not think it has anything to do with the generator, but the build order or other hidden arbitrary ordering (X/Y position etc).

Hmm. If someone could figure out how that happens and how to reliably reproduce it, that would fix the control unit + unlimited power on main line issue. Are those transformers the highest in your world? Most left/right? Anything else special about them? Dead dupe there or I don't know  

[nakomaru]

They are top right, and NG is middle left. I deconstructed them all and rebuilt the solar ones first once expanding to solar.

[Mullematsch]

Interesting. I can test it tomorrow. Maybe some other smart people have some input on this till then. 

[abud]

1 hour ago, Mullematsch said:

Lets say you want to use solar first. Then if smart batteries are below x hydrogen -> coal -> petroleum.

Control unit in unlimited kw line probably impossible, but we can put control unit in 20kw line. For example 2 control unit, each control unit serving some consumer line.

Spoiler