Compact 100% efficient soul bottler

[tin]

I've been lurking for a few months now, but I didn't have anything important to say until now. I've been using an inferior version of this design for some time now and only yesterday figured out how to make it 100% efficient so I decided to post this. So let's start with the specs:
-Size: 10x10x7
-Nether compatible
-Speed: 10 minutes/ stack of soul urns
-Price: it uses 3 BDs, 1 block detector, 1 turntable, 2 sticky pistons, 6 hoppers, and various redstone elements

General pics (explained below)

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So how does it work?
Looking at the second picture you can see the basic concept: A BD to place urns, a BD to dispense ground netherack into the hopper, and a detector block to see if an urn is present.
At the heart of the device is a BD counter powered by a turntable with two torches for maximum speed. Images below

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The contents of the BD

Basically it's a BD that is able to power two output lines independently. I divides the pulses from the turntable, sending eight to the top output (activating the blue circuit) but only if the detector is activated, and then it sends one pulse into the right side output. This one activates various circuits: The red one gets inverted and pulses the BD to place another urn, it is also directly connected to the detector block to prevent the BD from taking in an incomplete urn. The yellow circuit powers the piston that flushes the saw dust/hellfire dust from the top of the soulsand hopper. The green circuit powers the piston that puts the urns into the BD (this is necessary to keep the urn input and the soulsand hopper isolated, and can also be avoided using water).

Advantages:
It is compact, 100% efficient, cheap, and nether compatible. It can also be stopped and restarted at any time and can run out of materials and resume when they are available without any loss.

Disadvantages:
I'm not sure about how fast do you consider it. It definitively can't keep up with advanced urn making machines.

I hope you consider this helpful and if the explanation wasn't clear, here is the world download, it also contains the simplified version of the circuit.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/75977115/Test.zip


Thank you FlowerChild for making this awesome mod and for saying that we need 32 blocks of steel :)

[TheAnarchitect]

Nice use of the BD+Repeater! I'm going to have to play with this. If it can be sped up or reasonably chained together, it looks like it will work perfectly at the end of my pottery system + Embirrim's tube kiln.

Great first post and Keep up the good work. I look forward to seeing more from you.

[SterlingRed]

Epic first post! Welcome to the forums! Very nice design! One of the smaller machines I've seen, certainly much smaller than my monstrocity. I have no idea how quickly some of the other designs process, mines fairly fast, I'll run a speed test on it when I can. Pics are clear and the wool makes it easy to follow the wiring. I look forward to seeing you around!

[tin]

Thanks guys, glad to be of help. I'm also not sure how fast other designs are, as until now the only other design I've seen was SterlingRed's and I didn't really understand it.
Speeding it up is not an option unfortunately as the turntable is on the fastest setting and it has torches on opposite sides so it pulses twice every turn. As to chaining them, I haven't had a need yet, but I'll look into it. However the biggest problem that I foresee is evenly splitting the item stream.
I'm curious as to what designs others are using, as this part seems to be the most poorly documented aspect of the mod.

[TheAnarchitect]

Check out Battosay's videos, as they kinda form the standard. Look at the "my builds" thread. My own contributions are in my sig. Emberrim's tube Kiln is state of the art in high-speed tube-kilns. And hit up some of the let's play videos and livestreams.

[SterlingRed]

Thanks guys, glad to be of help. I'm also not sure how fast other designs are, as until now the only other design I've seen was SterlingRed's and I didn't really understand it.
Speeding it up is not an option unfortunately as the turntable is on the fastest setting and it has torches on opposite sides so it pulses twice every turn. As to chaining them, I haven't had a need yet, but I'll look into it. However the biggest problem that I foresee is evenly splitting the item stream.
I'm curious as to what designs others are using, as this part seems to be the most poorly documented aspect of the mod.

Haha...yeah my design is a confusing mess. I'm not sure I understand it. I really need to do a vid...

[Elektrohawk]

This is prettymuch the same as the system I've got running myself, copied and built mine off a video showing this same method a few months ago; (The method for detection, and replacement of urns), except! It's not 100% efficient. When the netherrack passes over the hopper, and 'filters', passing the soul into the urn, and fills the urn completely, there is a short slightly randomized delay, before the next urn is put in place. It depends on the rotation of the turntable, and the amount of lag going on, I find that the more stuff there is floating in water, the more stuff passing through hoppers, etc, the longer it takes for the new urn to pop into place (once again, using the exact same method listed here, and my design uses about the same size too, with no additional parts, except perhaps a couple more pieces of redstone.) During that time, any ground netherack that passes over the hopper will be filtered, but effectively wasted. The faster your ground netherrack supply, the more will be wasted, growing exponentially on bigger jobs.

Thus, when connected to only something like 2 or 4 millstones, (even numbers, odd other than 1 will have waste), then it should be, assuming relatively low lag, 100% efficiency. However, when running 6+ millstones (in my case, 8), your efficiency really starts to drop.

TL:DR, very effective, but quickly loses efficiency when handling bigger jobs. If you have many hoppers running at once, split the flow of ground netherrack, and set 2 of these up.

[embirrim]

Good job man! Nice to see people using all the tools at their disposal!

On to the speed.
There are a few things that limit the speed of soul urn bottlers. I would actually say that the n.1 limiter is the ground netherrack (unless you use soul dust), which is something people always forget. You can make it produce over 9000 urns per minute (yup, I just invented a new unit of measure), but if your millstones can't keep up... It's a bit useless.

One of the other things is the time it takes for the urn to pop back into place once it is dropped. The ideal setup is if you coordinate the urn replacement with each netherrack drop (or 8 drops if you only drop 1 at a time), so that it will never be unefficient. This is costly, big, and unless you have a steady supply of netherrack it's very difficult.

If you want to use a block detector, which is really what nearly everybody uses, you want to make sure that no netherrack drops onto the hopper when there are no urns under. Do this by either making urn replacement very quick or by making netherrack dispensing timed (instead of, say, directly connecting it to a millsone facility and waiting for it to slowly appear down the water-stream). You can make the dispensing part faster if you use more dispensers/BDs, however, once again, it is dependant on your millstones or soul dust.

I have to admit, it is extremely difficult to coordinate efficiency between various machine. Unless you have everything connected (like in battosay's rube goldberg machine), where each step limits the other one, something will always be faster or slower. And even his design is limited by netherrack, which he has to place in himself.
Anyway, good job man, keep posting.
How my designs normally go is as follows: need quicker X, realize I need quicker Y to feed X, realize i need quicker Z to feed Y, realize X is now too slow, etc etc etc, realize I am out of resources and it is 4 in the morning =D

[TheAnarchitect]

I just built a soul bottler using this controller. As to the timing, I found adding a few slabs between the 8 pulses to the netherrack dust dispenser and the one pulse to the urn placer gives enough time for all the dust to flow through safely.