yangshaoqin / advancedpowermanagement Goto Github PK

Advanced Power Management
-------------------

Welcome! This mod adds several new blocks to Industrial Craft 2 to help you
manage your energy grid. The scope of the mod has expanded since the original
version, and it is no longer named for the single block it originally added. You
will now find contained herein for your crafting enjoyment the following high
quality devices: The Charging Bench, the Battery Station, and the Storage
Monitor (plus the Adjustable Emitter for creative play).


The new and improved IC2 Charging Bench!
-------------------

The charging bench allows you to charge up to 12 items simultaneously! It comes
in three tiers with each tier capable of charging all items at its tier level
and below, but not above. If you want to charge your Quantum armor you'll need
to craft a HV version - there's no getting around the need for that specialized
high-power equipment, sadly. :)

LV Charging Bench
- The low voltage charging bench has a maximum input energy of 32 EU/t, and a
  base energy storage of 40,000 EU.

- Crafting recipe:
  1 Batbox
  3 Insulated Copper Cable
  1 Electronic Circuit
  4 Wooden Planks

MV Charging Bench
- The medium voltage charging bench has a maximum input energy of 128 EU/t, and
  a base energy storage of 600,000 EU.

- Crafting recipe:
  1 MFE
  3 2x Insulated Gold Cable
  1 Electronic Circuit
  4 Wooden Planks

HV Charging Bench
- The high voltage charging bench has a maximum input energy of 512 EU/t, and a
  base energy storage of 10,000,000 EU.

- Crafting recipe:
  1 MFSU
  3 4x Insulated HV (Iron) Cable
  1 Electronic Circuit
  4 Wooden Planks

Crafting pattern for all charging benches:
  CCC   C = Cable, W = Wood,
  WEW   E = Electronic Circuit,
  WSW   S = Storage Unit (Batbox, etc)

Features common to all Charging Benches
-------------------
Due to advances in over-current circuit protection designs, a Charging Bench
will not explode if exposed to higher than acceptable current but simply pop off
onto the ground in a safe manner, ejecting any items it contained.

A charging bench will automatically direct valid electrical items shift-clicked
from your inventory into the charging area if there is space free. Excess will
be placed into the input slot. Once an item is done charging, it will be
automatically moved to the output slot, if there is space, and another item from
the input slot will be added to the main charging area. In this way, you can
shift-click a full stack of RE-Batteries into the Charging Bench, and it will
automatically unstack and charge them. You can quickly and easily collect all of
them by shift-clicking repeatedly on the output slot.

While using a charging bench, you will have easy access to your equipped armor
slots. If you are wearing electrical armor, you can shift-click it directly from
your armor slots into the bench. When it's done charging, simply shift-click it
from the output slot (or the charging area, if you've let some other item loiter
in the output slot) and it will automatically equip the armor in the correct
location. It doesn't get much easier than that!

And we're not done yet with the awesome features of this mod! Each charging
bench now includes a pair of indicators visible right on the outside of the
bench. The storage meter lets you see just how much power is available for
charging up your items, and the charging light lets you know if those energy-
hungry items are done charging without even opening the GUI. You can toss in
your quantum armor, lapotron crystals, mining laser, etc, and walk away, and
with merely a glance across the room, you'll know when they're ready to be
picked up! Even the battery slot is wired up, so that if you're filling a remote
bench using items, you'll know when it's time to swap out the battery without
having to stand around waiting for it to discharge completely.

Available upgrades!
-------------------
All three tiers of the Charging Bench accept the standard array of upgrades,
with each having a very specific effect.

- The transformer upgrade will allow the lower tier benches to accept higher
  input energy, including energy crystals, lappacks, and lapotrons in the power
  input slot.

- The energy storage upgrade will increase the maximum energy storage of the
  device. The LV bench now gains 10,000 EU per upgrade, the same amount the
  battery used to craft the upgrade would be able to store. The MV bench gains
  60,000 EU or 10% of its base storage capacity for each upgrade installed. And
  the HV bench gains a whopping 500,000 EU capacity per upgrade!

- The overclocker upgrade lets you push your Charging Bench to the limit. By
  using quantum tunneling technology, the Charging Bench is able to carefully
  manage the voltage and current levels used to charge items and allow items to
  safely exceed their normal charge rates. This unfortunately has the same
  drawback that always accompanies the use of overclockers: The amount of power
  consumed increases even as the time required to charge an item decreases.
  Specifically, each upgrade increases the amount of energy transferred to an
  item per tick by 30% and the amount of energy drained from the bench's
  internal storage by 50%, growing exponentially with every overclocker added.
  Since it's hard to do that kind of math in your head, here's an example: Five
  overclockers approximately doubles the energy used to charge any given item,
  but the time required to charge it is reduced by nearly 75%!

  For those interested, the formulas for some useful values are:
    Speed:           S = (1.3^x)
    Time required:   T = 1/S
    Energy consumed: E = (1.5^x)/S
  where x is the number of overclockers. (Just multiply the normal values by S,
  T, or E.)

There's more!!
-------------------
The Charging Bench's input, output and power slots are exposed to pipes, tubes,
and other devices. Input is on top, output is on bottom and the power slot is
from all sides. While the GUI restricts items placed into each of the slots to
appropriate types there is no such restriction for pipe/tube access. It is up to
the player to design their systems so that the wrong types of items don't get
tossed onto the bench. But not to worry, there are no negative consequences to
inserting incorrect items, aside from temporarily clogging up the slot; the
bench simply will not do anything with items that it can't process.

Valid electrical items placed into the charging bench via tubes will
automatically be moved from the input slot to an available charging slot, then
moved to the output slot once fully charged. In this way, you can easily
automate recharging of items!

Modular construction with easy assembly and disassembly!
-------------------
Using a simple toolkit and a charging bench in your crafting window, you can
disassemble it into its components, which you can then use to upgrade an
already-placed charging bench simply by right-clicking on the bench using the
components. (You can also downgrade a bench, should you wish, but use caution
regarding the voltage of any attached cables if you do.) You will receive a
component kit for the bench you replaced, and can just as easily reassemble the
components into a complete bench, ready to be placed. This means that you'll
never lose a bench through this process! Additionally, if you no longer have any
need for a bench, you can strip the components to scavenge the useful parts from
them by right-clicking while holding sneak (as a safety measure), but be warned
that the wood planks are not returned - they're custom cut for the shape of the
bench, after all, and the scavenging process often requires breaking them up to
remove more delicate parts. (Plus there's no way to know what kind of wood was
used.)

The toolkit required to convert a charging bench into a component kit and vice
versa is very simple, requiring only one iron ingot and two sticks in the
following pattern to craft:

   I
  S S


Battery Station
-------------------

Sure, a charging bench lets you fill up a lot of items at the same time with
ease, but what if you want to do the opposite and drain power from a lot of
items? That's what the brand new Battery Station allows you to do!

The battery station comes in the same three tiers as the charging bench, but
where the bench is crafted with an energy storage unit, the battery station
requires a transformer instead.

LV Battery Station
- The low voltage battery station outputs energy in 32 EU packets, and can drain
  RE-batteries and other tier 1 power source items like the batpack.

- Crafting recipe:
  1 LV-Transformer
  3 Insulated Copper Cable
  1 Electronic Circuit
  4 Wooden Planks

MV Battery Station
- The medium voltage battery station outputs energy in 128 EU packets, and can
  drain energy crystals and other tier 2 power source items like the lappack,
  plus tier 1 power sources.

- Crafting recipe:
  1 MV-Transformer
  3 2x Insulated Gold Cable
  1 Electronic Circuit
  4 Wooden Planks

HV Battery Station
- The high voltage battery station outputs energy in 512 EU packets, and can
  drain lapotron crystals and other tier 3 power source items, as well as all
  lower tier power sources.

- Crafting recipe:
  1 HV-Transformer
  3 4x Insulated HV (Iron) Cable
  1 Electronic Circuit
  4 Wooden Planks

Crafting pattern for all battery stations:
  CCC   C = Cable, W = Wood,
  WEW   E = Electronic Circuit,
  WTW   T = Transformer

Features of the Battery Station
-------------------
Each battery station will output one packet of energy every tick, if it's able
to drain enough EU from the items in its inventory. Remember that different
energy storage items have different transfer rates, so a single battery in a HV
Battery Station will not allow it to provide power every tick. It will take
multiple ticks for the station to drain sufficient EU from one battery into its
buffer.

To avoid potential problems with excessive energy loss over cabling, a battery
station will never transmit a packet of EU less than its rated output. Instead
it carries over the buffered EU from one tick to the next until it has enough EU
stored to output a full packet.

A battery station can drain multiple items at once, if it doesn't get enough
energy from the first item to be able to emit EU (but it will only drain the
minimum number of items needed for it to be able to send one packet per tick).
This allows a MV (or HV) battery station to run at maximum efficiency even if
supplied only with charged RE-batteries (and/or energy crystals) instead of the
more expensive lapotron crystals.

The battery station supports automation features much like the charging bench!
It will move full batteries, crystals, or other storage devices from its input
slot to its discharging area, and empty items to its output slot. When an item
is removed from the discharging area the other items present will be advanced
automatically, so that newly added items will not 'cut in line'. That is to say,
the battery station operates in a FIFO (First-In, First-Out) manner, as long as
you don't rearrange items within its inventory manually, of course. ;) Like the
charging bench, you can use pipes, tubes, machines, or other methods to
automatically add and remove electrical items capable of being used as a power
source. In concert with a charging bench, you can even create systems to
automatically transport EU from one location to another, storing it in items to
avoid the inefficiency and material expense of long cable runs.

The input slot is accessed from the top or bottom of a battery station, and the
output slot is accessed from any side. Note that this layout is different from
the charging bench, because the battery station only has two slots that need to
be accessible. Cabling to accept the EU output from the battery station may be
attached to any face (top, bottom, or sides), or the station may be placed
directly adjacent to the machines you want it to power.

To help with automation, there is now a toggle button below the input slot which
controls the mode it operates in. If the button is dark, all valid items placed
in the input slot will immediately be transferred to the working area, as usual.
This is fine if you want to put as many items as possible into each station, but
if you want each one to keep just one spare at a time, you'll want to push the
button in so it lights up. In this mode, the battery station will only transfer
an item from the input to the working area when it finds that it is unable to
drain enough energy from the items in the working area to emit a full packet of
EU per tick. Until then, the item will remain in the input slot so that your
automation can't add more and/or can tell that it already has a spare.

Additionally, there is a new feature on the right side which lists some useful
statistics relevant to the battery station's operation. The top value is an
adaptive average based on the delay between packets. Its display will adjust
rapidly to increased energy consumption, although it can take up to 5 minutes
to settle back to zero (or 256 seconds to return to an induction furnace's
idle consumption of 1 EU per tick, for example). In testing it has proven to be
a stable and highly accurate measure of energy consumption rates, and yet has
no detectable impact on server performance! The bottom display is the estimated
length of time for which the battery station could maintain the current rate of
energy output. This is based on the amount of EU stored in the items in its
inventory, including the input slot, and the currently displayed average EU per
tick. It will update as energy is consumed from the items and when the rate of
energy output changes.

Finally, the battery station has two more features similar to those of the
charging bench. One is an activity indicator light, which will be lit while it
is draining items or sending out EU. The other is that a redstone signal will
deactivate the battery station, preventing it from performing any actions at
all.


Storage Monitor
-------------------

Everyone who's tried to set up an energy monitoring system of some sort knows
that the redstone signals from your batbox, MFE, or MFSU are very challenging to
make use of in an effective manner - not to mention the fact that if you have a
lot of wiring connected to the storage unit, it can be very tricky to get a
redstone signal out of it, too, especially using vanilla redstone mechanics!
Fret no more, because the storage monitor allows you to remotely monitor an
energy storage unit in an easy and user-friendly way. It will start emitting
redstone when the power level falls below a certain threshold, and stop when the
power rises above another threshold.

But that's not all! It allows you to easily configure the thresholds at which
the redstone signal turns on and off, so that you can customize its behavior to
your precise needs. Hook it up to activate your nuclear reactor only when your
MFSU's power is below 10%, so that renewable sources of energy will be used to
refill your power reserves as often as possible... or make certain your high
power consumption factory floor never runs out of juice by activating it any
time the power falls below 80 or 90%!

Just craft a link card and connect it to the device you wish to monitor by
right-clicking on the batbox, MFE, or MFSU with the card. You can even monitor a
charging bench, or other mods' EU storage blocks, if they implement the
IEnergyStorage interface from the IC2 API! Once you have encoded the card with
the storage unit's unique ID and location, insert the card into the Storage
Monitor and use the controls to configure its behavior. Or you can just keep the
default settings, and the redstone signal will turn on when power falls below
60% and shut off when it rises to 90%.

If you need to move your energy storage unit or want to reuse a link card
elsewhere, there's no need to throw it away and craft a new one. You can wipe a
link card clean by holding it in your hand and right-clicking in the air while
holding your sneak key (as a safety feature to prevent accidental erasure). It
will revert to a blank link card creator which you can then reuse on any storage
unit you'd like.

Crafting recipes
-------------------

Storage monitor
  1 Gold Cable (No insulation)
  1 Electronic Circuit
  1 Redstone Dust
  2 Glass
  4 Wooden Planks

Pattern:
  WUW   U = Uninsulated Gold Cable,
  GEG   W = Wood, E = Electronic Circuit,
  WRW   G = Glass, R = Redstone Dust

Link Card Creator
  1 Insulated Copper Cable
  1 Electronic Circuit
  1 Paper

Pattern:
  C     C = Cable,
   E    E = Electronic Circuit,
    P   P = Paper


Emitters? What's this?
-------------------

Originally created for testing purposes, we have added these Emitter blocks to
the creative inventory as a bonus for people playing in creative mode or wanting
to test electrical builds without having to constantly spawn lapotron crystals
and MFSUs.

There are five versions available. They have no crafting recipes, and must be
acquired from the creative inventory or via tools like NEI.

LV Emitter
-  Emits LV current (32 EU/t) when powered by redstone

MV Emitter
-  Emits MV current (128 EU/t) when powered by redstone

HV Emitter
-  Emits HV current (512 EU/t) when powered by redstone

EV Emitter
-  Emits EV current (2048 EU/t) when powered by redstone

Adjustable Emitter
-  Emits a custom amount of energy when powered by redstone.
-  Comes with a GUI that allows you to configure the amount of energy per packet
   and the rate of energy generation. Packet size can range from 4 to 8192 EU
   (in case you have cables that can carry more than 2048) and EU generation
   rate can range from 1 EU per tick to 65536 EU/t, but has an additional cap of
   64 packets per tick to prevent excessive server lag. If packet size is
   greater than EU generation then a packet will not be emitted on every tick.


Credits
-------------------
Original idea: Drashian
Original Charging Bench graphics: Starlight
Battery Station textures: Tallinu
Emitter and Storage Monitor textures: Pantheis
Charging Bench and Battery Station GUIs: Tallinu
Storage Monitor and Adjustable Emitter GUIs: Pantheis and Tallinu
Charging Bench toolkit and upgrade item textures: Tallinu
Storage Monitor link card item textures: Pantheis
Code: Pantheis and Tallinu

Special thanks to the original Charging Bench mod. Without your ideas for
inspiration, this mod wouldn't exist.