Serial Smart Battery Automation - [Oxygen Not Included]

I tried to find a similar post before doing this, so bare with me if anyone already posted this.

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What is the point of this?

I saw a a couple posts that use smart batteries and automation to fully charge normal batteries. While I didn't find this incredibly useful, since batteries have a larger battery drain, it got me the idea of serializing smart batteries to minimize the battery drain.

The idea is to switch between drain mode and fill mode. During the fill mode the power generation is ON and the batteries get charged one by one from side A to side B. During drain mode the power generation is OFF and batteries drain from side B to side A.

Now what I didn't do is actually think about the power efficiency too much, but I assume that there is some efficiency gain because there are more fully drained batteries like this at any given time.

How it works

The modes (drain/fill) are triggered by the two outer most batteries through an SR latch.

Power shutoffs at the wires comming from the generator directly get the Q and !Q of the latch (in my setup I use Q with a NOT gate because of wiring), so either side A or side B is directly connected to the circuit.

In between the batteries there are shutoffs that are steered by checking the left and the right battery charge and the mode signal.

Please improve this!

If you look how I set this up there is a ton of space required for the automation of the "between battery" shutoffs. I assume that we can come up with a more compact version, even if it is just the layout design.

In mine the OR gate takes the smart battery output. Only one of the batteries at any given time would normally be drained enough to make the output go active. For the OR gate it goes to an edge detector which is the connected NOT and AND gates. For there it goes to a toggle switch XOR gate where the output is connected back to one of the inputs. The toggle switch changes the output status each time the input from the edge detector goes active. Finally there's the NOT and AND gates that are just an inverter and the AND is a delay so the output of the NOT and AND happens at the exact same time.

What this does is whenever one of the batteries in drained enough to require recharging which we can assume will most likely be because it's the one currently connected to any consumers it sends a signal to turn on the generator (taken from the 3 connected port at the bottom), and at the same time switch which battery is connected to the generator, and which is connected to the consumers. 

I know this is a quest for knowledge and all, but why not just use one of the battery terminals and not bother with automated disconnects. You're talking about saving negligible amounts of energy by charging or discharging in sequences. When they're all smart batteries, they're all going to fill up and discharge at the same rate if they're on the same circuit.

Perhaps I'm not getting the bigger picture. The only use I see in this is when switching a stationary bank between a charging loop or generator mains bank and a several over loaded demand circuits - where the smart battery determines both the stationary bank's intermediate baterry and the auxiliary demand sensing smart battery determines the charge state ( and thus power demand ) on a switched circuit ( result being a need to be connected to a charging source ) - ie, a single power generator, multiple circuits with an auxiliary battery each, and a primary battery for handling loads while switching.

Short version of that would be, say, having one hydrogen generator with a smart battery, and three 2kW circuits, each with a smart battery ( and some potential load which might overload them if they were all connected together )

@The Plum Gate Yeah I didn't explain the circumstances well. I guess you would use this setup for example if you want a centralized HW battery bank and power generation. You can scale this design up indefinitely by adding more batteries and shutoffs in between. You still want batteries because you want to simplify your circuits but you want to avoid the power drain, which I agree is small. But for the sake of fun I set this up.

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This will improve your power efficiency, because it not only shuts *all* the power generators off when all the batteries are full but also has on average less battery power drain. My guess is that is about 50% less drain, since between the "all fully drained" and the "all full" states you have also "some are fully drained" states, since it fills/drains only one battery at a time. If you only have the vanilla smart battery setup with one of them directly steering your power generators then you have constant battery drain from all the batteries except for the short time when they are fully drained (after which they send a signal to turn on the power generators).

1 hour ago, eggsvbacon said:

So basically, is this a way around overloaded circuits on any type of wire while also saving some power?

Lamen in the house.

Not really.  The local circuit that has all the stuff connected to it can still have over-loaded wires if you go over the wire's rated wattage.  What this does allow you to do is avoid using heavy-watt wire and transformers.  (To a degree)  Transformers are still useful for forcing one set of batteries to charge another set of batteries. 

My ultimate plan for my R1 base (If I do anything further with it) would be to have 3 main smart batteries, each hooked up to a set of coal, natural gas, and hydrogen generators and allowing to stagger when each set of generators is turned on.  From there, connect through a transformer and the wire leading off the transformer would work it's way around the base and be connected to various switched power packs for local circuits.  Thus, the transformer would always top-up the batteries of the switched battery packs from the stored power of the main 3 batteries.

With my R1 base, I had decided to explore using Saturnus' switched battery packs and it worked out pretty well and it's still there.  Unfortunately, I did run into an issue with it:  That wire bridge.  At times, I found that it liked to randomly over-load itself while no other wires on the circuits did.  This probably has more to do with the 2 air pumps and electrolyzer that's also on that hydrogen generator circuit just above and to the left of this switched pack.  The idea here was to have the generator charge battery A first (It's set to 90% - 75% ) since it would be for my air unit.  The NOT gate on the power shut-off prevents the switched pack from charging when battery A is trying to charge.  This would mean, in theory, only the excess power produced would go to the rest of the base.

Later on, trying to get away from using the possibly buggy wire bridge, I came up with a new switched battery pack, although it's not nearly as compact as Saturnus' unit.  However, by using two NAND gates wired to each other to create a latch (Just like Clickrush did at the top), only one battery at a time can charge while both batteries can discharge.  So, there should always be one battery, at least, hooked up to the local circuit.  I'd imagine Saturn's edge-dectector did basically the same thing, but I just couldn't really follow that thing, so this is what I came up with. 

I'd also imagine this setup would let you chain more smart batteries to it, if you wanted.  The 'left' battery will always prevent the battery right next to it from charging if said 'left' battery is trying to charge.

17 hours ago, Mutineer said:

What do I not understand what is the purpose of this? What advantage of having batteries charge one by one and not together? Energy loss is rather small on smart batteries.

It's really only to avoid using heavy-watt wire at this point.  Batteries don't count as a 'load' on the wire thus, if there is only batteries on a circuit, then you can have as many generators on that wire as you want.  The type of wire doesn't matter so you can use the watt wire to connect all your generators together.  Then, by controlling which battery is charging, (And, by proxy of the switching design, not connected to your power consumers using the power shut-offs) the generators and that -watt wire will never 'see' the load of the power consumers.  This technically eliminates most needs for transformers too.

Of course, transformers are a lot cheaper to make then these switched power supplies, so really it's just being able to not use heavy-watt wire that's the advantage. 

Unfortunately I can't put a screenshot up at the moment, but fiddling with this got some interesting results. I tried to simplify this as much as possible by using the built in logic of one smart battery to do the heavy lifting logic control. Each battery has a pair of power shutoff's, one connected to input power (generators or transformers) and the other to the load (consumers). Smart battery A is wired to its input power shutoff and battery B's ouput shutoff, and then Not A is wired to B's input shutoff and A's output shutoff. This makes sure the outbound power wire always has amps from one battery while the other battery gets charged.

The other trick is to send the OR of A and B to the generators, which ensures that whenever a battery is low it will request charging and the generators don't overproduce power once the batteries are topped off.

The biggest downside I can see is there's no good way to limit which generators fire when they get the signal, it's all or nothing. Maybe you could have one type of generators clustered with a small amount of heavy wire, a smart battery to control the generators, and a transformer to push power to downstream batteries. This feeds to a small wire which is the input wire for all the switched power supplies.

I could also see a brownout condition if one battery A doesn't charge fast enough before B is exhausted, but in that case you're not generating enough power anyway.

Edit:

Power abuse mechanics are a go if you're willing to spend the metal. 1 smart batt per group of generators you want to control, and 1 transformer per 5kw of power to put on your 1kw main line. I'm using 2 smart batts here per power station but it works with 1 smart and 1 tiny battery if you want instead. Granted, on this scale it's not really material efficient but I could see this as a viable alternative for larger bases, especially if you had more than 20kw worth of generators.

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