Serial Smart Battery Automation Improved

[clickrush]

I started a new base to check out the new update (it's great!) and wanted to implement the build I tinkered with in debug mode a while ago:

But again, the issue was that this build felt too complicated, I was sure that it can be at least a bit simplified and made easier to scale up. And success! Here it is:

Basically my old build was fighting against the fact that smart batteries already have an inbuilt SR-Latch. This build uses this to its advantage.

Explanation

This build doesn't have a "from left to right" kind of mode anymore. It will always drain and charge from the same side, which is the outer right battery in the picture. You basically choose a battery that is directly connected to the rest of the circuit, including consumers and producers, while you serially isolate the rest with power shutoffs and some automation. The outer most isolated battery (far left in picture) steers the mode (drain vs. charge).

You can make this more compact to fit into scalable 2 height rows.

The only downside of this build in comparison to the previous is that it is theoretically possible that the batteries empty by their inherent drain before the automation cycle reaches them. But I don't think that would ever be an issue in any kind of practical build

[Mlah]

Can we see how you have the power lines set up? I don't understand how you are isolating the generators from your consumers if they are all on the same side of the power disconnects and tied together.

[blash365]

Pretty sure the powerline is simply a straight HW-Wire going from left to right.

 

The design is neat, but what is the benefit over all batteries in the same cuircit without automation? Can we reduce heat output or something with this build?

[Mlah]

So the previous design abused the fact that only the wattage drawn by the consumers, excluding batteries,  on a circuit is used to calculate if the circuit is overloaded. So if you have a generator outputting 100 KW you can connect that to a battery using normal wire and it won't overload. If you check the wire it will so the capacity as being 0/1000 W. If however, you toss 5 pumps on the circuit it will overload as the circuit will now show as having 1200/1000 W.

So what you can do with this is have a smart battery that can switch from either being connected to your consumers or to your generators. When it is connected to the generators you can have whatever wattage you want on any type of wire and it won't matter because the batteries don't count against you. When the battery is connected to the consumer you need to follow the same rules as always. 

 

Basically, it works exactly like a transformer does, allowing you to have high wattage on one side of the battery and lower wattage lines on the other. The main advantage over a transformer is the high wattage line can now be done with normal wire as opposed to heavy watt wire. This means you can run it through walls and face a less severe decor penalty.

[clickrush]

8 hours ago, blash365 said:

Pretty sure the powerline is simply a straight HW-Wire going from left to right.

 

The design is neat, but what is the benefit over all batteries in the same cuircit without automation? Can we reduce heat output or something with this build?

There is automation? The benefit of this is to reduce the passive battery charge loss. It achieves this by reducing the number of batteries that have charge at any given time. It also does the standard thing of shutting down the generators when all batteries are full (which also initiates the drain mode).

If you run this, this will drain/charge the batteries one by one, while the batteries on one side of the charging/draining one will be empty and the ones on the other side will be full.

12 hours ago, Mlah said:

Can we see how you have the power lines set up? I don't understand how you are isolating the generators from your consumers if they are all on the same side of the power disconnects and tied together.

The power line is in fact just a HW wire through the batteries to the generator. The generators themselves don't need to be isolated from the consumers, they will get shut down as soon as the batteries are full until the last battery is drained.

4 hours ago, Mlah said:

So the previous design abused the fact that only the wattage drawn by the consumers, excluding batteries,  on a circuit is used to calculate if the circuit is overloaded (...)

No my designs are simply battery charge loss mitigators.

The design you are referring to does not reduce battery charge loss, because it will always charge or drain a battery (or several) while it switches back and forth. Or in other words, there is never an empty battery.

However my design is geared towards large power consumption and production needs with a sizeable battery bank on a HW circuit. Combining the two might be possible but is not something I've done so far.

[Soulwind]

While I appreciate what you've built here, I don't see why you would want to. A single smart battery connected to each bank of generators is all you need.  The gens only run on demand. 

[clickrush]

25 minutes ago, Soulwind said:

While I appreciate what you've built here, I don't see why you would want to. A single smart battery connected to each bank of generators is all you need.  The gens only run on demand. 

Because I want a large buffer. If your power I/O is large enough then a single smart battery will constantly switch on/off and you have no leeway of doing things in bulks with large power spikes.

[blash365]

9 hours ago, clickrush said:

The benefit of this is to reduce the passive battery charge loss

Good to know. I was under the impression that there was no battery-loss yet.