DW20 Improvised "Dust Piler"

boriseng, Wed Sep 16 2015, 08:04PM

This is a way to solve the problem of "Tiny pile of ..." products from IC2, but it could also be used to gather the nuggets from oreberry farming, or even as an ultra-compact cobble compressor that can handle multiple stages of compression.

It performs the function of the GREGTECH!! dust piler, which could handle a mix of "tiny piles" and gather them into regular dust piles.

The picture shows most of it, what you can't see is the return duct under the chest and there is a hardened retriever sucking items back into the chest. In the background is some IC2 machinery, including the ore washing plant that makes the dust in the first place.

The servo is set to only extract the items to be packed. I've used whitelist mode so it won't attempt to retrieve items that can't be packed. The way the ducts are arranged means the tiny dusts enter the packager first. If there are enough then they get combined and the retriever retrieves the complete dust pile. The presence of items in the output spot stops the retriever from grabbing the input materials, which is why I only used a hardened retriever and not a faster one.

If there are insufficient dusts then they sit in the packager's input slot until the retriever pulls them back to the chest. This makes it circulate the items trying each in turn until it has nine of an item at which point it will pack them. Without the retriever the first incomplete batch would jam it. Ideally I'd use an item pipe that only moved stacks of exactly nine items, but I don't seem to be able to do it with ducts. Maybe conduits could do it?

This would probably work for the infamous cobblestone compressor but I've got it running with a cascade of six packagers now and don't feel like rebuilding.