Fully automatic power production control

[Neotix]

One sensor and no dupes  Very easy setup.

Overlay of entire setup. We have sensor on top, generator bellow, buffer battery (optional), transformer, "sensor" battery, transformer and battery "array" (for testing purpose I used only one battery). Pumps bellow imitate energy consumption.

Wires connections. Very important is to connect valve and pump after first transformer, not directly after generator.

Automation. Buffer gate is to avoid fast ON/OFF when sensor battery is in depleted/charged mode. Calculate time to avoid overproduction.

Sensor pipes. It need very little of water. The lesser, the better. In this test I used 100g of water. I found out that shutoff valve don't consume energy when little of fluid go thru (probably because of rounding float values).

How it works?

When "sensor" battery is depleted, shutoff valve is closed and water drop on airflow tile. It's very important to use them, not regular tiles because pump will take all water at once and not even a drop will leave. Hydro sensor is set to "Above 0" and sent activation signal to the generator. Battery between transformers won't be charged until battery array is full so pump in sensor won't work til then. When battery array is full, "sensor" battery start charging and pump take water from hydro sensor. Buffer gate will keep generator running some time to charge buffer battery and then generation will stop. When "sensor" battery will deplete, entire proces will repeat.

[bzgzd]

1 hour ago, Neotix said:

Sensor pipes. It need very little of water. The lesser, the better. In this test I used 100g of water. I found out that shutoff valve don't consume energy when little of fluid go thru (probably because of rounding float values).

Nice "no power" detector.

Shutoff needs power to work but it seems to not consume any energy even with 10kg water blocks going through it...

 

[Saturnus]

2 hours ago, Neotix said:

How it works?

When "sensor" battery is depleted, shutoff valve is closed and water drop on airflow tile. It's very important to use them, not regular tiles because pump will take all water at once and not even a drop will leave. Hydro sensor is set to "Above 0" and sent activation signal to the generator. Battery between transformers won't be charged until battery array is full so pump in sensor won't work til then. When battery array is full, "sensor" battery start charging and pump take water from hydro sensor. Buffer gate will keep generator running some time to charge buffer battery and then generation will stop. When "sensor" battery will deplete, entire proces will repeat.

So basically just a copy/paste of my post here then

 

[Neotix]

Hmm I see that we had the same idea with just little differences.

 

[Kiako]

If I may, you should use a D-latch and two of your power detector, one between transformer, one at the end.

You would no longer need a timer : no power at the end would mean starting the generator and power between the transformer shutting it down.

For more on building  latches in ONI, some useful links : several building including latches  & T latches

 

No more power start the gen then power between the transf stop it

[clickrush]

4 hours ago, Saturnus said:

So basically just a copy/paste of my post here then

 

It absolutely has to be a copy paste, because only one person in this world can conceive something that genius.

[Saturnus]

3 minutes ago, clickrush said:

It absolutely has to be a copy paste, because only one person in this world can conceive something that genius.

Tongue in cheek humour isn't your strong suit I see.

[clickrush]

8 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

Tongue in cheek humour isn't your strong suit I see.

When somebody thinks of the same things as you it means that you are similar or connected. An opportunity to share approaches and ideas and have fun.

[Saturnus]

8 minutes ago, clickrush said:

When somebody thinks of the same things as you it means that you are similar or connected. An opportunity to share approaches and ideas and have fun.

The idea has been around for a very long time. I think it was @PVD or @Kasuha that first posted it many months ago, April or May, I think. I also described it a bit more fleshed out for this exact purpose in June or July. Back then it was obviously using a liquid filter as the by-pass valve instead of the newly added shut-off valves.

The thing that amused me was just how exactly similar the set up were to the one I off-handedly posted last week. But then again, you can only rearrange the parts in so many ways so that's not surprising, merely amusing.

[OfficialLolicon]

One question, is it material and time consuming?

I think it is and I rather use the manual gen setup, but I could be wrong cause this is automatic and dupe free, giving a single duplicant a better job and making it useful for even larger bases. 

If it is material consuming and time consuming, I rather not, since I'll probably be busy doing something else with, and the time I'll build this, I'll probably be having no jobs que( or will b little).. I'm still new to the automation so I might be wrong.

[Kiako]

I find this useful for Hydrogen generator. They tend to use all hydrogen on top of your base which usually mean a drop in O2 density and for no real use.

An other use would be lots of power-consuming building used together and infrequently. Many batteries may provide the power, and they have to be charged.

Quite specific but not so useful as we have many way to generate energy. This may change if an harder difficulty mode appear.

[Neotix]

8 hours ago, Kiako said:

If I may, you should use a D-latch and two of your power detector, one between transformer, one at the end.

You would no longer need a timer : no power at the end would mean starting the generator and power between the transformer shutting it down.

For more on building  latches in ONI, some useful links : several building including latches  & T latches

 

No more power start the gen then power between the transf stop it

This solution require more materials.

I prefer timer because it require only one buffer gate and a little of math.

Natural Gas Generator produce 800W and that is equal to 0,8kJ per sec. Battery hold 40kJ so one NGG require 50sec to charge battery. Adding capacity of sensor battery and dividing it by 0,8 i get time to set in buffer gate. Of course minus few sec to leave some margin of error.

Entire calculation:

[ Buffer battery (40kJ) + Tranformer (1kJ) + Sensor Battery (10kJ) ] / (Sum of Generators power / 1000) = Require time - few sec.

My setup that use small batteries require total 26,25sec to charge witch 0 consumption (worse scenario) so i set 24sec in buffer gate.

[Kiako]

Up to me, timer (your solution)  is better if power consumption is stable, no doubt about this.

I tend to use some building from times so I need the latches kind of solution so make sure battery are always up. Not to mention the fact that I often test things that failed miserably, therefore changing the timing to charge the batteries

[Neotix]

Even with unstable power generation and consumption that timer will do the job because it won't start until battery array is fully charged. Even without it, entire setup will work and only generators will be ON and OFF quite often, especially when battery array is on the border of being fully charged. Timer only prevent that rapid changes.

[Parusoid]

I don't get it. So how do you make one battery fill before another. Aren't they filling up simultaneously? 

[sadovsf]

So far that looks like being achieved by transformers. They "shield" out circuit bahind them so battery only powers transformer, that powers other battery and so on. Only when last battery is filled transformer in front of it will stop asking for power resulting in previous battery starting to fill up etc...

[Parusoid]

56 minutes ago, sadovsf said:

So far that looks like being achieved by transformers. They "shield" out circuit bahind them so battery only powers transformer, that powers other battery and so on. Only when last battery is filled transformer in front of it will stop asking for power resulting in previous battery starting to fill up etc...

Pretty clever 

[Neotix]

I noticed strange behavior. Sometimes when transformer suppose to transfer all energy to another transformer, it hold 200J. This cause that anything connected to that transformer is powered immediately. I still don't know what cause that because when I deconstructed and reconstructed wires it disappeared and trick start working once again. Maybe it have something with building order or something.

[Angelix]

39 minutes ago, Neotix said:

I noticed strange behavior. Sometimes when transformer suppose to transfer all energy to another transformer, it hold 200J. This cause that anything connected to that transformer is powered immediately. I still don't know what cause that because when I deconstructed and reconstructed wires it disappeared and trick start working once again. Maybe it have something with building order or something.

transformers work like kind of battery

[-SchiavoR-]

It's great, I implemented with sucessful, but, how the best solution for non linear power consumption?

[Parusoid]

@Neotix It does not seem to work. How exactly it stops generator for the duration of battery array being not empty?

[Neotix]

When battery array is not empty, generators should work because liquid sensor detect water on airflow tiles. They stop when array is full, sensor battery start charging and little pump suck water.

BUT because of not deterministic behavior of transformers, this solution is bugged. Sometimes transformers don't pass thru all energy in first ticks and hold a little Jules even if next battery is empty. This cause powering little pump and stopping generators before battery array is full, then "bugged" transformer release this little energy and generators starts (entire proces repeat). I tried to figure out why this happen but with no luck. Sometimes when I replace wires, "bugged" transformer behave normal (pass thru all energy), sometimes rewiring do nothing.

[Kiako]

9 hours ago, -SchiavoR- said:

It's great, I implemented with sucessful, but, how the best solution for non linear power consumption?

Neotix's formula have to be change a little

[ Buffer battery (40kJ) + Tranformer (1kJ) + Sensor Battery (10kJ) ] / ((Sum of Generators power- Sum of used power) / 1000) = Require time - few sec

This mean depending on the timer setting the generator

- will only partially fill the batteries if your are using a lot of power (  sum  of used power should be MIN sum of used power )

or

-  will work while batteries are full  (  sum  of used power should be Max sum of used power )

An elegant solution would be to use automaton to turn on both heavy power consumption building and some generators.

 

My* solution (see above) will guaranty a charge from empty to full even if your energy consumption is non linear. This also mean a few second without available power because it need to detect this, and an additional power consumption (which you can avoid if you're using the trick of Neotix above).

* somebody else explain this in a post, see above

[Parusoid]

6 hours ago, Neotix said:

When battery array is not empty, generators should work because liquid sensor detect water on airflow tiles. They stop when array is full, sensor battery start charging and little pump suck water.

BUT because of not deterministic behavior of transformers, this solution is bugged. Sometimes transformers don't pass thru all energy in first ticks and hold a little Jules even if next battery is empty. This cause powering little pump and stopping generators before battery array is full, then "bugged" transformer release this little energy and generators starts (entire proces repeat). I tried to figure out why this happen but with no luck. Sometimes when I replace wires, "bugged" transformer behave normal (pass thru all energy), sometimes rewiring do nothing.

So what is the buffer gate for in this setup?

[Neotix]

When battery array is full, generators will stop and then batteries will start discharge. When battery array is on the edge of being full and start discharging, generators can start and stop in continuous loop to keep array full. This may cause a lag and waste a little energy (almost continuous running of mini pump) so the buffer gate is to keep generators enable few second to charge buffer batteries. This will cause that transformers will be disabled until battery array start discharging.