Minecraft: Semi-Auto Furnace

Rovers, today I want to address the concept of the simple Furnace.  If you are like me, you enjoy roaming too much.  You don't want to sit around and baby a furnace, taking items out and putting them in.  Luckily, they've fixed some things by introducing hoppers!

If you check our my build here, you'll figure out how to build your own semi-automated furnace.  You can drop by and drop any coal or ore you may be carrying.  Go ahead and carry on with your roving, it will be taken care of automatically and be smelted or cooked upon your return.

The whole build starts with a furnace.  The way hoppers interface with a furnace is this.  If a hopper feeds into the side, it will go into the fuel slot.  If a hopper feeds into the top, it is the object being cooked or smelting.  If you put a hopper under the furnace, the finished product will be put into it.

Roving-tip: If you want a hopped to feed into something in particular you need to press shift and click on the side of the block you want the hopper to feed into. It will default to pushing things straight down if you don't do this.

So if you build a hopper system right, you can build your chests all in a row and label them so you know what to put into them.   I put the output into two hoppers that chain into a dropper.  Then I put more droppers in a line up into the chest.

This is where I personally hit a stumbling block.  How do I make the droppers work?  They need a red stone circuit to activate them.  You need to activate them all to get the item up to the chest.  It looks like we need a circuit to activate all those droppers.  (I left one dropped out of the stack so you could see the orientation of the hole it pushes out of)

This would be the solution for you.  It is a clock circuit.  Two hoppers repeatedly transfer an item back and forth, momentarily turning on a red stone circuit.  I only put two items in and it works forever.  The only problem was, it ran forever!  Endless clicking!

A rover needs to keep his sanity.

So my next move was rejiggering the circuit to incorporate a lever to turn on the droppers.   I flowed it into a single, solid block.  I ran the clock circuit into the same block.  The last part is to find a way to flow this power to all of the droppers.
 

This is the way you do that.  A red stone torch jutting out from the block with compare only allow the signal through when you flip the level. You then flow the redstone to a block next to the bottom hopper.  As high as you need to go you can flow by alternating redstone torches and blocks.

Here is the end result.  I built it all above ground to give you a chance to see all the moving parts.  if you want to bury it in the ground like in my first picture, you just need to put it all down in the ground 3 blocks so only the chests are visible.

The buried clock circuit.

 The buried hopper tower.
 

The final, buried result.  Only, know that to open the chests you'll need to break the blocks above the chests so they have the ability to open.  Or else you can't fill them.  I like to put half slabs above them to make it look a little cleaner.