Cycle Sensors and Doors

[Spoonwood]

I learned that doors can get automated once when I used automation wire near a power plant.   It would open and close according to when the hydrogen generator turned on or off (not respectively or respectively, I don't recall the details, if I figured them out at the time).  At the time it was just an amusing quirk.  I did find a use later.

I generally keep a bunch of unpowered incubators to have hatches ready to go when the older generation dies out.  But, I often end up with a bunch of excess hatches, and since I prefer to have tiles than natural tiles, the hatches stay awake and strut around, or wake up and strut around.  I could cull them periodically I suppose.

But, since I often have a natural tile outside of the incubator area, and make nature reserves along my central chamber, I end up putting pneumatic doors at the edge of that hatch ranch.  I finally figured out...

I could automate the pneumatic using a cycle sensor so that a hatch can walk over to the natural tile to burrow, and then close the door before the hatch wakes up.  Basically this means that the incubator room door shuts shortly before night, and opens a little after daybreak.

Now I'm wondering.  I've often thought that it might be neat to have a colony where every duplicant runs on a wheel for some fraction of a cycle.  If this period were right after a duplicant woke up, but the door was locked by a cycle sensor, and every duplicant had low operating priority, is it possible that a duplicant will end up running on a wheel attached to a light for a bit, and then they get off the wheel shortly after the door unlocks?  Or will the duplicant keep running?

[Spoonwood]

Cycle sensors can turn pedal generators on and off, and thus a duplicant can get allowed to run only at certain times of a cycle it seems.

But, the idea of locked doors in the morning might lead to an issue if the duplicant needs to go to the bathroom or the full bladder stress penalty.  Private bathrooms and wheels would work, but that seems like a whole bunch of space and building per duplicant, since they'll need a cot, a wheel, and toilet facilities for 10 tiles total and that likely means more piping or each duplicant needs to do toilet maintaining.

I certainly wouldn't want a duplicant in an oil biome to run back to their wheel for a 1/12 of a cycle of wheel running.  The whole idea lies in saving time later by increasing athletics, but if they do that on a regular basis, it seems like a time waste.

I guess if I have an exosuit row of docks outside of my bedroom and lock it's door when duplicants go to sleep and bathrooms to the side of the bedrooms, that would solve the potential 'can't got to the bathroom' issue.  But, I often have staggered schedules with one or two duplicants on a block.  Maybe if I have 4 duplicants per block, that might work with an exosuit dock, if I have 4 toilets instead of 3 as I've had in the past.  Would probably need each duplicant with limited access to doors also, so that they won't sneak out some unlocked door.  The timing involved here seems a bit complicated to do precisely.  Maybe I want a timer sensor?

Locking doors also might lead to duplicants sleeping on the floor instead of them making it to their cot or plastic bed.

So, I don't seem to have a good idea as to how to get duplicants to run a bit every cycle without other issues potentially happening.  Any ideas?

[tuxii]

2 hours ago, Spoonwood said:

Or will the duplicant keep running?

They'll keep running, You could connect the cycle sensor to the door and to the wheel with a not gate in between so that when the door opens the wheel gets disabled.

An interesting approach to be sure but I would never want to do this because in early game I want my dupes working on stuff usually (sometimes that is on a wheel but only when actually needed) and in late game I set up gyms for the freshly printed or otherwise idle duplicants.

[blakemw]

If you want to use doors connected to automation to selectively allows dupes through at paricular times, you either need a Duplicant Sensor inside to force the door open, or you can make a second door and use direction restrictions to only let dupes out via that door. If the room is 4 tiles tall it's easy to just stack both doors on top of each other.

When I make hamster wheel gyms, I just connect the wheels to a Timer Sensor set to something like 20/0.2 and with priority 1, so dupes get kicked off once every 20 seconds to look for new tasks.