Dispenser stops shooting items when full

I've got a basic chicken farm, which takes eggs from a bunch of seed chickens, and channels them down to a dispenser. The dispenser has a comparator coming out the back which checks whether it's full, then it starts a comparator clock, which fires the dispenser until it's empty. It works great, until the dispenser gets full, then it stops working for some reason. Any ideas on how I can modify this so it'll always work?

The pictures below should illustrate my setup. If you imagine the third picture is a still frame: all the eggs are in the dispenser and nothing is happening. The comparator isn't turning on or off.

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4 Answers

When the dispenser is full, the comparator is getting a signal strength of 15 from the dispenser. The signal from the repeater that it leads into is giving at most a signal of power 12 to the side of the comparator:

As 15 > 12, the comparator remains on.

To fix this, you should have the repeater lead into a comparator clock, rather than using the same comparator to detect the items in the dispenser and act as a clock. E.G:

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Munbo Jumbo have a good fix for this problem :

This technique is based on a comparator clock. In your case you have not set the comparator to subtract mode. if you right click on the comparator the torch on the front will turn on and your clock will work.

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You should set the both repeaters to 2 ticks and the comparator to subtracting mode. this is because the comparator cant keep up with your one tick repeaters because a comparator uses one tick for cauculating it's output

Just right click both repeaters one time as well as the comparator. this should fix the problem for 1.8.8. (i don't know if it works in the snapshot)