Swaziboy

nice! I see we both landed on very similar solutions to this. I'm going to implement your double-reversi loop to see how that plays out - it's the main difference to mine which keeps the secondary piston extended by default, and it retracts and pushes based on the pulse-extender decaying fully.

I like this, thanks for sharing!

OK, so here's the update. thanks to all the suggestions - I combined a few ideas, and came up with the following solution.

The observer triggers as items drop, this does two things at once:

1. Drives a pulse extender which immediately retracts the secondary piston
2. Pulses the primary piston after a short delay to push the items into the space that the secondary piston just made

As the clock decays fully the secondary piston fires and pushes the items.

An added bonus here is spam protection - so if items drop consecutively more quickly than the clock decays, it simply resets the clock so you don't get pistons firing together, or too quickly. This way nothing ever ends up on the top of the slime/honey blocks. I've added a front-side view for those curious as well.

Thanks for all the help and tips!

ok, I think I see how your system works now - I moved the dropper so it drops on the right spot and I now see the pistons firing regularly as expected. It does get a little messy with the speeds of them firing however I really like the idea so thanks for sharing.

I tried to implement this, however my right hand side piston stays extended for the duration of the pulse extender rather than firing and retracting like the left hand side one does. Not sure if I am missing something in the pic that I cannot see. I also wasn't able to figure out what you're doing with the dropper - seems like it's on top of the observer for some reason and the clock coming out of it doesn't do anything?

that's a novel approach, thanks for this - I am going to test it alongside my current version based off @authorinthedark@lemmy.sdf.org 's suggestion. Will come back with findings, thanks!

ohh yes, I like this idea, lemme have a crack at it, tnx! (I suck at redstone lol!)

Fixed!

WTH - nooooooooooooooooo

wow, I re-read what I wrote originally - that was some terrible work! Hopefully much clearer now!

oh shoot! Good catch, I will edit the main post.