As of what's posted, you either directly place it in the block dispenser (It's accessible), or you drop them in as items into the turntable chamber. They'll get fed into the block dispenser the same as clay balls.
Of course, that means you have to load each one individually. This is practically speaking easy, but where's the fun in that? So I've been working on an auto-loading system.
The lights mean my machine is empty. So I load 18 full stacks of clay balls here.
And send it up to the machine.
The machine itself is two 6-long blocks of my extendable design. Replace the water-wheel with a windmill and this would work in the nether. Those lens you see are part of the empty-detector: when there isn't enough clay left to make clay blocks, a hole develops over the second piston and the light shines through the whole length. When the elevator reaches the top the items go through the transport piston tube to get dropped into a hopper.
This double hopper setup is needed for timing. The first hopper collects clay until it is completely full. Then it sends a redstone signal to a t-flipflop, which turns on the top hopper and turns off the bottom one. The top hopper drains into the bottom one. The bottom one fills, and sends a constant signal to a monostable circuit, which sends a pulse to the T-flipflop, resetting the system. This lets the bottom hopper drain, but not all at once....
Gods, this is where pictures break down. I tried capturing a desktop video but I have no idea what I'm doing and it turned out really, really grainy. What you are looking at is an item transport conveyor belt system. It's alternating iron rails and solid blocks, pushed around in a circle by pistons. Items fall into the iron rails, and get pushed around by the solid blocks. The whole thing is run by a single turntable in the center. There are two empty blocks in the sequence, and pistons on opposite corners fire at the same time. You get a complete rotation every 2 ticks.
So here's our issue: we want to evenly divide our clay between all 12 of our turntables. So we have exactly 12 iron rails in our conveyor belt. They all line up over the turntable hoppers at one critical moment in the rotation. But before that we want to drop evenly divided amounts into all 12 slots. We do this by timing our hopper to pulse on when there is a rail block under it. That's going to require some serious timing work, but fortunately our conveyor belt system is also a rotating Memory drum at no extra charge!
I used both glass blocks and cobble as my memory bits. The glass and the iron rails don't send signal, the cobble does. When a signal goes through, it pulses 2 ticks, dropping slightly less than a full stack of clay balls. There's a single repeater in the signal line to allow fine-tuning the timing. This is also the reason for the complicated hopper setup: I needed to turn off the pulsing signal until there was enough clay in the hoppers to be evenly divided. What I've got setup is kludgy and I'm sure it can be streamlined, but it works.
Once all 12 bins are loaded, they travel around the circuit until they are lined up with the hoppers. When that happens, block dispensers remove the block under the bit and all the items fall into their respective machines. So how do we time that? The same rotating Memory drum, of course! There's one special bit in our conveyor, different from all the others.
That glowstone block travels around the circuit. It acts like glass when it passes in front of the redstone signal output, but when it passes in front of the lens, the lens sends signal. This activates the trap doors. That's right, Motherfuckers, thanks to the lens we can now encode a second type of information into our piston-based memory drums: redstone on/off, light on/off.
They system isn't perfect: it doesn't divide as evenly as I would like yet, and it's a mess of redstone right now. I fiddled with the timing so much even I don't really know how all of it works. I think with a little timing adjustment and some bricks in the hoppers I can get an even 1 stack to the bin, and I'm certain I can simplify my wiring. Also, it has the horrible issue of being a rotary design, while my turntable machine is so very linear. So we'll call this the Mark-2, and commence work on the Mark-3 tomorrow. World download Here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?jjnna4ed39qn2kj
::Edit::
I also want to make it entirely clear that this is a work of Mad Science. By this I mean that somewhere along the line designing this, the Muse descended. I stopped thinking and just Built. I'm not entirely sure how the timing mechanisms are working. The redstone confuses me. Repeaters set to different delays by feel. I don't know why I need two hoppers on top, but it doesn't seem to work with only one. I have two lenses, shining down adjacent tunnels, with pistons fired from the same signal, that have different blinking frequencies like two different turn signals. They go in and out of sync with no explanation. One turntable setup produces a vase instead of an urn every third pot, and I can't figure out why. I think it might be Lag. The more I think about this machine, the less it makes sense to me. I'm hoping the Mark-3 will be more understandable.
