The Harvester bot. (4/4)

[rkda]

This is Harvester.

This bot is the workhorse of the farm. (It's not the only robot on the farm, but, by a long shot, it does the most work).
You can see the interior of the three chips in the previous posts in this series.

[Denis]

So this is detecting the wall (comparing to rock if I get this right)? I can get the robot to hoe and plant semi-automatically (I still need to change tools), but not cut down the trees because the bumpers interfere. So when harvesting I need to unwire the bumpers and this becomes a manual thing.

[rkda]

Off to the right side of the bot, there is a green box with a rock in the middle. This is a GENERIC rock sensor. It's input is connected to all 4 bumpers, though the OR gates below it. The output of the sensor goes hot any time I bump a rock (wall).

Sensors are what make automation possible. Before sensors you are just constructing fancier knobs and levers. Once you have sensors, you can actually start making decisions based on the environment, and get some useful automation working.

The generic part is important.
There is another (useless) rock sensor up by the name. That one only detects a single kind of rock.
So depending on where I touch the wall, it may or may not fire.

[worfc]

When you craft an item sensor (this is all in the little popup help that happens at the time, also in the sensor tutorial), it is blank. You program it to detect whatever you want via signals. A signal could come from a bumper (when bumpers go hot, they also send an item signal indicating what they bumped. If they bumped multiple things, the recipient is likely to catch the 1st signal on the list. You may recall me writing about how I want to implement a probe that you can use to view the signals on the line), or from inventory (the item selected pin carries an item signal of what item it is, also a count signal of how many you have.

When you set the item sensor, you also have the option of making-hot the generic pin. If you set the sensor to an ironwood tree without the generic pin, your sensor will become an ironwood-tree sensor. If you set a sensor with the same ironwood tree with the generic pin set, you create an any-tree sensor.

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* Again, this is in the popup help, but it might be worthwhile to jot notes when you get to that point, as you can only set a blank sensor once; it can't be re-set.