Recycler and centrifuge

Old parts and slag become ore again: the recycler breaks down, the centrifuge separates. Both work in a flow – and both stop when nothing drains away behind them.

Recycler#

The recycler (StructureRecycler) breaks inserted items down into their materials. Printed parts give back half of their material. An ingot gives back the materials of its furnace recipe – for superalloys, which need 4 units per ingot, that is only a quarter. It collects the materials and outputs them as a reagent mix. Readable are Reagents, ImportCount, ExportCount and slots 0 (input) and 1 (output).

Centrifuge#

The centrifuge (StructureCentrifuge) separates reagent mix, slag from the furnace and dirty ore from the deep miner into pure ores. It works in two phases, controlled via Open:

• Closed (Open 0): it takes in and spins while it is on and has power. Reagents rises meanwhile.
• Open (Open 1): the drum runs down, which takes up to about 30 seconds. Only when it stands still does it output one ore stack per reagent – whole units only.

From 400 units it is full and reports Error 1 – then it processes nothing more. But it also reports Error 1 while it is open. When emptying, that is normal.

Controlling the flow#

The chip empties in time before the limit and closes again when nothing more comes out. That is a state with memory:

sge tmp content REST
and empty empty tmp
sge tmp content FULL
or empty empty tmp

From 350 units it opens, below 1 it closes again. In between it stays as it is. Why not only at 0? The centrifuge never outputs a material of which less than one unit is inside. Reagents then stays at, say, 0.4. The rests simply stay inside and come out with the next filling.

Safety net: nothing comes out any more#

If rests of several materials are inside, their sum can be above 1, for example 0.6 carbon and 0.6 silicon. Then the threshold alone does not help. A second counter measures how long Reagents stays unchanged while the centrifuge is open:

seq tmp content before
and tmp tmp empty
add wait wait 1
mul wait wait tmp
move before content
slt tmp wait STILL
and empty empty tmp

Because the drum runs down for up to 67 ticks before the first output, the limit has to lie well above that: 120 ticks, one minute.

Detecting a jam#

A jam shows at the output: slot 1 stays occupied because the chute behind it is full. A briefly occupied slot is normal, a long occupied one is not. A counter measures how long:

add count count 1
mul count count tmp

If the slot is free (tmp 0), the multiplication sets the counter to 0. If it is occupied, it keeps counting. Above 20 ticks, i.e. ten seconds, the light reports a jam.