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[DeathOfRats]

The destroying water part would have been irrelevant, though I hadn't considered it. You'd just need to open the upper door every cycle, then, and make sure the water is pressurized only at that level.

The second pressure plate was there to close the floodgate when it'd reached 7/7, but now that I think of it it wouldn't have really worked for two reasons:

1. Floodgates and bridges ignore close orders while they're opening.

2. They don't toggle, but rather change to whatever the thing they're connected to does.

RE: the mini-repeater, it's cool, but I'm not 100% sure I get how well it'll work. I'm going to have to test it. It seems pretty nifty, though.

EDIT: I like the mini-repeater, and it's awesome for something you want to trigger approximately every 200 ticks, but sadly enough, it doesn't seem to be accurate (by which I mean, it doesn't always trigger in the same number of ticks) so it can't be used to have a perfect clock. That's a pity, 'cause it would have simplified my life a lot. Do you think upping the pressure would help? I'm uncertain on that matter.

EDIT to the EDIT: After re-reading the wiki article on pressure, it seems like it would. I have to check this.

[Shakma]

I think high pressure might fix it but I'm a little worried about the draining on the back end off the PP.  Maybe a pump to a FG instead of just a FG would fix that.

[Time Kitten]

I'd have the pump tick system fully independent, then add on a flow repeater for the display.  So that the inconsistancy of water is only ever seen as lag on your didgital type display, while all the computational areas rely on pump to pressure plate to pump and toggling gear accuracy.

[DeathOfRats]

High pressure does seem to make it go a little more regularly, but 6 z-levels of pressure aren't enough. I'm debating whether I should try to find a variation on my design that would work (probably having multiple repeaters chained to form a big one), or try to make a, dunno, 30 z-level pressure chute to make this repeater work. Hmm...

[Peewee]

Solution to keeping the input pressurized but not backing up to the output:

(side view)

Code: [Select]

XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
S~~~~<< X OXXX
XXXXXXX   XXXX
XX >>~~~~~XXXX
XXWXX~~~~~IXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
~ - water
X - wall
W - unregulated, super-pressurized (if you want it to be... it shouldn't matter if it's pressurized or not) water intake from a holding chamber or whatever
I - input for whatever vertical timing machine you come up with
O - output for the machine... height doesn't matter (as long as it's taller than 3 z-levels), just let the water drop, unregulated, to the water below.
S - leads to a storage tank or whatever you do with water output.

[Shakma]

Death-

There may be some potential doing it like so:

Code: [Select]

Side view:
#X<< ####
####_<< #
#### >>B#
WWWWW####

B is a drawbridge
_ is the pressure plate to the bridge and floodgate.

Should work as long as the drawbridge can destroy the water before the floodgate opens and you won't need any significant pressure. 

Peewee, I have no clue what you are trying to do there.

[DeathOfRats]

That could work. Looks like it'd be, what, 101 ticks, square? I'm not sure if having both drawbridge and floodgate on the same trigger will work deterministically, but that can be tested.

Sadly, I won't be able to do it now, so it'll have to wait till tomorrow or so. If anyone wants to test it beforehand, be my guest 

[Shakma]

I think it would be 202 ticks.  Can't test it for a while either.  Maybe this weekend.

[DeathOfRats]

Also, as far as I can tell, Peewee showed a nice way to depresurize water if you have a device that takes presurized water as an input. I'd say it's pretty sharp, even if I don't think we'll need it this time.

[Quatch]

I'd just like to chime in with how awesome in general this thread is.

[Quietust]

I've just assembled a much more accurate repeater (though not 100% perfect, and I suspect that's unavoidable), based on the original design. While perfecting it, it looks like the rest of you have independently come up with a design using similar changes.

Instead of receiving water directly from a brook, it receives water from a pressurized tank (5x5, 15 Z-levels deep, filled from the brook), and instead of having a floodgate opposite the bridge to smash the water, it has a screw pump on the Z-level above which pulls the water off the pressure plate (and drains it off the map through fortifications) and a 2-tile drawbridge that lowers over the pump's input tile. This way, when the bridges lower, high water pressure insures that the plate is (almost) instantly covered with 7/7 water, and when the bridges raise, the screw pump will insure that the 7/7 water is instantly removed from the pressure plate.

While testing this version, I found that it operates with a period of 301-302 ticks, though very rarely it will take 303 - even with such high water pressure, sometimes it decides to take 3 ticks for the water to flow the 2 squares from the tank to the pressure plate. The actual timing of the device is as follows:

0 - water hits pressure plate, sends "activate" signal
100 - bridges raise and water is removed from pressure plate
200 - pressure plate sends "deactivate" signal
300 - bridges lower
301-303 - water hits pressure plate

Filling the intake using 2 screw pumps (instead of natural pressure) might remove the delay and give this device 100% predictable timing, though I haven't tried this yet and don't currently have the time to do so. Further experiments are welcome.

While working on this design, I also discovered that a retracting bridge takes 101 ticks to open/close while a raising bridge takes only 100 ticks.

[Quatch]

How are you guys measuring the number of ticks?

[Quietust]

How are you guys measuring the number of ticks?

By pressing "." a bunch of times and keeping count.

[DeathOfRats]

While working on this design, I also discovered that a retracting bridge takes 101 ticks to open/close while a raising bridge takes only 100 ticks.

That's news to me, but it's good to know. Thank you Also, your design sounds pretty good. I particularly like how the only incertitude is in the last step - which I expect can be completely eliminated without too much trouble by hooking two of these together.

Shakma: In the end I managed to test your design, and as far as I've seen, it only works once. I think it's because I had to set the PP to 4-7 to ensure the bridge would act correctly, and that screws the floodgate. It requires an inverter between those two elements, I think. Back to the drawing board for me. This is fun

EDIT: Quietust, I've been thinking a bit more about your design, and you're right: putting bridges over the input tiles of the pumps works great. I think I'm going to use a variation on that, with the bottom pump being toggled off once it's sucked a single tile worth of 7/7. I'll turn it on again after the next PP, that way I can make sure I'm not feeding more than a single 7/7 block into the system. This should make it possible to use it in a closed loop, without needing any new water.

I'll tell you guys how that works tomorrow afternoon (GMT+1 time), if nobody else tests this first. Now it's time to sleep *yawns*

[Quatch]

Does anyone know how many ticks are in a day?