Automated Active/Dormant Geyser Timer Display v0.9

[darknotezero]

I've been doing a bunch of tinkering to figure out a way to get an automated active/dormant geyser timer, and I think I've finally sorted it out. It's a bit janky, suggestions are definitely welcome.

Spoiler

Left side and right side are identical, just organized differently (right side was me trying to be more efficient).

Mechanics:

upper set of counters is doing the actual count.

lower set of counters is your target number, so if you want the timer to reset and Do Something (in this case, shift timer to other side to track dormancy/active..cy), set the counter limit for each digit to your desired target.

filters on the lower counters are set to 1s. Filter on the XOR gate is also set to 1s, but it could probably be shorter.

How it works:

Spoiler

 

Suppose counter goal is 2xxx.

When upper counter reaches 1000, the thousands digit also gets sent to lower counter, but no green signal sent. Once upper counter reaches 2000, lower thousands digit goes green which gets sent to the "AND" gate above the hundreds digit after a filter delay/memory toggle which ensures that the hundreds place doesn't trigger at the same time and iter by 1 prematurely.

That "AND" gate now permanently green on one side allows for green signal in upper tens digit to trigger green signal in lower hundreds digit until the hundreds target value is reached.

Rinse and repeat until the entire target value is reached. When that happens, green is sent to both counters to reset them, the reset ports of the memory toggle to reset them, and to a binary counter (1 or 2) which flips the timer signal to the mirror set up on the left side. That last bit can be used to have anything else trigger that you like with to-the-second accuracy over long periods of time (if you use a water clock).

 

For expediency I had the timer here running with green at 0.5s and red for 1.5s. In my real colony example, I have a simple water clock that's counting one hundredth of a cycle so i can see a display of xxx.x cycles that i'm currently managing manually.

Spoiler

Next steps before actually trying to build this in my colony is to expand the setup by one digit (which may annoyingly require 10 bits, but i'm not 100% on that yet) and make sure it works, then test against actual hundredths of a cycle to make sure that the filter gates don't break with the memory toggle and start premature iters (which i'm pretty sure won't happen). Then I can take this scheme and put it into my actual base somewhere and create some sort of dashboard that can track all of my geysers, or at least the high priority ones since creating 10-12 of these setups is a pretty large negative decor footprint.

Feedback welcome.

 

[thegroundbelow]

What on earth is that giant automation gate at the top, right under the timer?

[darknotezero]

13 hours ago, thegroundbelow said:

What on earth is that giant automation gate at the top, right under the timer?

a signal distributor. send the input signal to one of four outputs. in this use case I only need two - one to set off the "active period" of a geyser, the other to set off the dormant period of a geyser

[blash365]

Do i correctly assume that this timers purpose is to display us the remaining activity time of a geyser without having to mouseover/click it?

Or is it something different?

[gabberworld]

and this how looks mine , had to say it's for testing only as i not see atm any usefull at all for this

[darknotezero]

On 11/7/2020 at 8:22 AM, blash365 said:

Do i correctly assume that this timers purpose is to display us the remaining activity time of a geyser without having to mouseover/click it?

Or is it something different?

basically. The counter counts upwards in tenths of a cycle, and then automatically resets when a desired number is reached. In this context, i have it duplicated so that the counter can reset based on two numbers: active period of a geyser vs dormant period of a geyser.

So i have to know the numbers i'm targeting; it'd be nice if there was a count backwards feature, but i'm rolling with the cards i'm dealt.

On 11/7/2020 at 8:51 AM, gabberworld said:

had to say it's for testing only as i not see atm any usefull at all for this

it's not really *necessary*, but it's a fun project for me and makes easier some of the stuff i have going on in my base. I'm drawing water from two cool steam vents and natural gas power from two natural gas vents. being able to see in one place where they are in their active vs dormant periods so i can track my heavy saturation periods (where both like-geysers are active) or heavy dormant periods (where both like-geysers are dormant) is useful data that i'd like to be able to see easily.

I am starting to think about it for more long term practical purposes, say, for a process that I want to turn on for 20 cycles and turn off for 5 cycles. I know that there are water clock solutions to this that don't rely upon display automation, but a) i wanted to tinker with solutions that used zero power and the one water clock solution that I found that used zero power wasn't working for me, and b) i'm fairly obsessed with dashboards that display relevant information all at once in a single glance. i have this picture in my head of a single area that displays all of my active/dormant geyser periods in a nice row.

Granted, the amount of resources and real estate that my solution takes up is pretty obsessive, so actually putting this into my base is still a question mark. but it was a fun thing to put together and work through the kinks.