Optimized 2x Solar Scanner Network Module

[ruhrohraggy]

After a few hundred cycles of development, I feel ready to present to you, the nearly set it and forget it meteor defense and cleaning automation module. Self contained, self automated, and runs on solar! Provides 99.99% meteor proof automation to the rest of your arrays!

I call it the M.A.D. system, for Meteor Automation Defense.

Why M.A.D. you might ask? Well, it's the main emotion I felt when trying to setup solar power for the first time...

After cycles and cycles of having my solar panels bbq'd, trying this, trying that, failing miserably, searching the forums for some solution, being dismayed there was nothing exactly like what I wanted...I gave up on all that and focused on designing my own system. I wanted something that managed itself, wasn't extremely complex and didn't blow up if something went wrong...and I feel like I've finally built what I was looking for.

So here, I will start with the full setup, and then give a detailed breakdown of how to build and test your own!

 

 

 - Some intro notes and pictures with the full setup to kick things off! -

 

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To reiterate, the main points are :

 - Normal tile surrounding the solar panels and batteries is abyssalite. It transmits basically 0 heat and is cheap and quick to build.

- There must be a 1 tile gap between the glass tiles and your solar panel...or your solar panel will melt. Solar panels do not generate heat, so if they are in a vacuum, they are at 68F or 20 C FOREVER.

- I also like to have 1 space between the bunker door and airlocks...Without this space, I've noticed the iron meteors causing damage to the airlock doors through the bunker.

- Scan quality should be 19% for this system, which provides 40s of detection minimum. This is 1.8 seconds above the minimum time needed for bunker doors to close. I prefer having the bare minimum, because your solar array is spending more time soaking up the rays before the meteors hit.

- It's better to build this a little higher up if you don't have the entire map bunkered off. This makes it take longer for regolith to pile up under your scanners and solar panels. I chose to build mine on the left edge to see how that worked out...but then realized buildings placed on the left-most tile will not receive power...(whoops) I think the best spot for this system is one tile away from either the left, or right edge of the map, a decent way up into space.

- Once you are done building this, you can then route the 2 automation wires from the bunker doors and the airlock sweepers, to the rest of your solar arrays...and voila, all of your bunker doors and door-floor cleaning systems are now hands-free automated! I would however, recommend using the AND gate battery failsafe (I'll cover this later on) for each group of solar panels powering a set of bunker doors, so if for any reason a section of solar panels runs out of battery, their bunker doors will close and they will be safe.

 

 

Also, as you can see, I'm on cycle 922. I originally built this thing on cycle 819. That means, it has been running without dupe intervention for over 100 cycles now. Nifty!

 

 - Hey, are those solar panels are stacked...what gives?

It turns out, that this arrangement I've found [so far] to be one of the most efficient when it comes to solar wattage per floor tile.

Here's some readings taken from the lower panels just after midday.

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So giving up 2 floor tiles, gives us roughly 300 extra watts! Woohoo.

 

Now, on to the automations!

Here is a breakdown of the automations used and how to put them together.

 - Next up we have the sweeper automation sequencer -

It works by pulsing opposing on-off signals through XOR gates to generate a single pulsed output with defined duration, and then stop. In order for the sequence to activate again, the signal must turn off, and then on again. This allows our sweeper doors to clean up all that nasty regolith and stay open after the sequence ends, so we can let all that wonderful light in, and re-activates the system once the bunker doors go from closed, to open...wasting very little up-time on the solar panels receiving light.

Here is the most basic version of this automation.

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If we set our filter gates 5 seconds apart (5s and 10s), this will give us a single pulse, with 5 seconds of duration on, 5 seconds of duration off, and then back on again where it stays on, until the input is toggled from off to on again.

What's nice about this automation is that it is simple, and doesn't require much memorization or notes to setup. The other nice thing is that it is easily expandable.

 - Here is the automation setup used for the M.A.D. module in action. -

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Through testing, I've found 3 pulses to be ideal, but you can quite easily add or subtract the number of pulses by adding/removing filter and XOR gates.

The timings for these filter gates are set from top to bottom. They are as follows :

Filter Gate 1 : 50s

Filter Gate 2: 55s

Filter Gate 3: 60s

Filter Gate 4: 65s

Filter Gate 5: 70s

Filter Gate 6: 75s

The times are setup this way for 2 reasons. The first reason is that it gives the bunker doors a chance to fully open, and for regolith to drop down before the cleaning automation begins. The second reason is that it gives the airlock sweepers enough time to fully open and close, any faster results in the not fully opening or closing, and regolith will begin piling up. You can do it in 4 second intervals, but I prefer 5 to be safe.

 

- The automation for the bunker doors is straightforward, so I won't go into depth on that. -

Just make sure to note that it's routed through an AND gate, which acts as a shut-off failsafe for both the Scanner and the battery. Though they're pretty tied together, it's just an extra precaution. If either of these vital systems needed to run go down, you can rest assured, knowing that your bunker doors will close and protect your hard-earned solar panels. it's also a good habit to get into for future solar panels being installed after this module is installed, as they will be alot more reliant on this shut-off device to remain safe if their battery bank ever goes down.

 

- Next up, optimizations and power management -

The arrow in this picture is pointing to the AND gate under the left scanner that acts as the bunker door failsafe. It is linked to both the scanner, and the battery.

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When the scanner picks up incoming meteors, the doors will close.

If the battery bank falls below a certain threshold the doors will also close. To figure out what that threshold is (Spoiler, it's 12%) we gotta do some math

Which we will do now :

- 8x bunkers x 120 watts = 960 watts x 38.2 second = 36,673 J =~ 36.7 kJ.

- 1x Scanner = 120 watts x 38.2 seconds =~ 4.6 kJ    (we'll get to why I used just 1 scanner in a moment)

For a grand total of 41.3 kJ needed for the doors to shut completely.

There are 13 smart batteries total for the base system, 14 if you plan to safely route power elsewhere (I will cover this later), each has a 20 kJ capacity, for a total capacity of 360 kJ or 380 kJ respectively.

So the optimum battery % setting to allow the bunker doors the full 38.2 seconds to close while being powered is :

For 13 batteries : 41.3 kJ / 360 kJ * 100 = 11.47% or ~ 12% (round up to be safe)

For 14 batteries : 41.3 kJ / 380 *100 which is 10.87% or ~11%

(ignoring natural battery drain here due to rounding up should be ok here)

By the way, for those wondering why I used all smart batteries (which are material expensive) it's because they lose the least amount of energy per cycle. Really, you should be swimming in refined metal by this point, so why not put it to good use.

 

- Power management / Optimizations cont... -

2 Scanners are only useful until meteors are detected. This setup gives us some power savings by way of disabling the 2nd scanner when an incoming meteor shower is picked up by either one of the Scanners.

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(The XOR gate below the scanner will open the airlock door-floor when either scanner picks up a meteor signal. This disables the scanner, and saves us a fair chunk of power. )

Both scanners will not always detect the incoming meteors at once, and quite often, it's the scanner on the right that ends up picking up the signal first. That is why there is a buffer gate set to 200s, to hold the incoming meteor signal while the scanner is de-activated. This will give the Scanner on the left enough time to pick up the signal, and keep the bunker doors from re-opening.

 

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(The right scanner picked up the signal first and has been de-activated, the buffer gate now hold the signal)

 

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^(The left scanner finally picks up the signal)^

 

- Eeeking out surplus power safely -

Now, I know what everyone else has gotta be thinking...sure, the M.A.D. should just be for detection and automation control for the rest of the solar network...but... it's still generating extra power. How do we get that power without jacking up our defense network, so we can power some other stuff?

Gotcha covered! Here's how to do it safely :

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The battery on the left is hooked up to the M.A.D.'s battery bank. The battery on the right is where we'd like to spend the extra power in our base, or wherever.

Between them is a wire shutoff linked to the smart battery on the left through a NOT gate. As soon as the solar array is no longer charging this battery, it will sever the line, safeguarding the M.A.D.'s battery bank. Standby is set to 100, Active is set to 95.

I cannot stress enough how important having that battery bank near full is. If you get really bad RNG with night cycles and meteor showers, you'll want every last drop of power in that bank.

- Cooling of our battery bank- is done via hydrogen and 4x wheezeworts. The 4x wheezeworts should provide a very minor net cooling effect for the bank. I filled the room with around 1kg / tile of hydrogen. and then sealed it. If you don't like using wheezes, then you can use the hydrogen nomming anti-entropy device.

If you don't want to have your main battery bank for it right underneath, then don't. Just make sure to have 1 smart battery up there to automate the safety shutoff at the correct %'age.

 

- Finally -

Here is an expanded view of the entire automation circuit, if you're struggling to see how I did mine, this should help.

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- Closing thoughts -

I will note that there are still a few kinks to work out, but this has been the most stable build so far for me. Though it has not yet been perfected (yet) it's been pretty darn reliable.

The biggest source of headache is the left scanner. If for some reason or another regolith piles up on the left scanner while the right scanner is inactive, the scanning system will stay offline but the bunker doors may stay open...Thanks to the failsafe however, if you manage to catch this in time, you can merely set the battery responsible for turning off the bunker doors to 100% for signal activation to run emergency shut-down on the bunker doors...A dupe would then need to go clean out the regolith...

What is probably the most obvious way to solve this, is to swap the bunker doors over to the scanner on the right, and use the bunker tile and single door for the more important scanner on the left. The scanning quality should remain the same, and this shores up the last weakpoint of this overall, stable system.

As to the regolith piling up...I've only noticed this happen once in 100 cycles. It occured when the system missed a cleaning cycle and that's when I was fiddling with the automation....After that, I sat there and watched it work perfectly for around 100 cycles

The other issue is that it might be a little costly in steel, diamond and refined metal, and it requires the use of conductive wires, as the system exceeds 1000 watts. (not by much though, annoyingly) But I think as an initial solar placement...It's well worth it.

As far as I can tell, the regolith getting cleaned this way, seems to eventually get deleted once the piles exceed 20t. Another few additions could be an auto-sweeper system for the iron and so forth, but as for the scope of the M.A.D. module, I was primarily concerned with a worry-free, fully automated meteor-detection and cleaning module...so it wasn't high on my priority list. As to the rest of my solar panel farm, yea, I'll probably work on a better way to recover all of that delicious iron.

-Update- Here is my revised setup. A simple swap of bunker doors and bunker tiles from the less important scanner to the critically important scanner. This incurs a 1% loss of Scanner Network Quality (for some reason?), but I feel 38 seconds is more than adequate. If by some chance you take a meteor strike because of 0.2 seconds...that's just really bad rng.

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So go ahead, get M.A.D. and keep your solar array from ending up like this :

 

Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoy the fruits of my many cycles of hating meteors, vacuum, sunburns and regolith!