Pipe full power on switch

[Kasuha]

Okay, this is the most convoluted design I made in ONI so far and it required more time than I'm ready to admit but it works.

In this case, it is used to power an air scrubber in the small room on the right. When the room gets full of CO2, it starts up the hydrogen generator and generates exactly enough power to process what's coming through the pipe. When the input pipe becomes empty, the hydrogen generator stops and the scrubber runs out of power soon after, waiting for more material to process.

Here is the pipe scheme when in "pipe empty" state. Some of the bridges are not visible but I believe you can find them from this.

And here is how it looks when it starts up:

How does it work:

When off, the red loop driven by valve V1 and the orange loop driven by valve V2 cycle packets that sum up to exactly 1000 grams, blocking hydrogen coming through input line marked in yellow. Nothing gets to the blue line towards the generator.

When CO2 comes in through the white line, it first clogs the vent, then goes through the pink line and blocks the orange cycle. If individual packet comes through, it makes the device generate exactly one packet for the generator over the blue line. That's usually not enough to get everything processed. When the backup reaches the input of the mechanical filter by the valve V3, the orange cycle becomes blocked permanently and continuous stream of packets comes through to the generator, starting continuous power generation.

After the pink line cleans up and the orange loop opens, input is again blocked. The mechanical filter at valve V4 is there to catch remnant of large hydrogen packet that may have formed when the orange cycle was only partially blocked and was still sending hydrogen to the CO2 line.

Valve V1 directs size of packets that will be sent to the generator. In my case, 120 W draw of the scrubber requires 15 grams of hydroget so I attempted to set V1 to 1000 minus that, i.e. 985. It is safe to use slightly larger values to make sure there will not be surplus of generated power.

Valve V2 is not critical but should be set to something bigger than that packet size. I set it to 60 g/s.

Valves V3 and V4 are mechanical filter valves, again setting is not critical, should be less than 500 g/s, preferably something small.

The pipework on the left is just a pipe buffer, it is not part of the contraption.

There's no problem if it runs out of hydrogen - it will start processing when hydrogen is available.

The line between output of valve V2 and input of mechanical filter by valve V3 should be as short as possible as the longer it is, the more hydrogen may collect there before the generator is actually started. The setup I used only allows creating one 1000 g packet.

Output of mechanical filter by valve V4 does not have to be sent to the generator but it was simpler for me and it's no problem if the generator generates some extra power at the very end because when the pipe gets empty, there's still prenty to process in the room.

Edit: the last unnamed valve is fully open. It's there only as an element to separate parts of the pipework to avoid confusion of the piping system.

[Lifegrow]

Great Jesus....

I'd have used a terrarium.

(slowly retreats back into the shadows)

[Kasuha]

22 minutes ago, Lifegrow said:

I'd have used a terrarium.

It's about switching a power supply on when input pipe of something gets blocked, it's not limited just to air scrubber.

As far as I know, a machine uses power regardless of how big are pockets of gas it processes. So for instance if you want to cool some gas, it's good to let the gas first stack up in a pipe buffer before you start up the regulator. This both switches on when the pipe is full, and provides independent power supply so you don't have to worry about random overloading some of your general purpose circuits.

But yeah. Terrarium would be simpler solution. Except it eats algae and I'm trying to avoid using that in my game.

[Lifegrow]

31 minutes ago, Kasuha said:

It's about switching a power supply on when input pipe of something gets blocked, it's not limited just to air scrubber.

As far as I know, a machine uses power regardless of how big are pockets of gas it processes. So for instance if you want to cool some gas, it's good to let the gas first stack up in a pipe buffer before you start up the regulator. This both switches on when the pipe is full, and provides independent power supply so you don't have to worry about random overloading some of your general purpose circuits.

But yeah. Terrarium would be simpler solution. Except it eats algae and I'm trying to avoid using that in my game.

Hah, i'm only joking buddy - been watching all of your pressure management piping threads and i'm fully aware you're looking at some complicated notions  

[Kasuha]

I made the device a lot simpler today. Only two valves, one to make suitably sized packets for the generator, the other for mechanical filter stealing these packets from the pipe and sending them back into short loop. When the pipe gets blocked, the packets go to the generator instead.