I have completed a fully automatic raw chicken farm which sorts the output and disposes of the feathers and transports the chicken to a mass storage depot Added a few more pictures.
the eggs are filtered out by the sorter and returned to the upper hoppers by a droppervator, When the top double chest is full, it triggers a redstone repeater to activate the sticky pistons to kill all the chickens, after they retract the piston at the far end moves the redstone block into place to start the firing mechanism and lock the hoppers under the chests.
when the left hand dispenser is empty, it fires the piston to stop the dispenser and unlock the hoppers under the chest, once and egg reaches the left hand dispenser, it fires the piston to retract ready for the next cycle of the circuits.
auto loader
the minecart with hopper sits on a detector rail which locks the hopper above the track, however this can still be emptied by the hopper below it and filled by the hopper above it, when the detector rail decides the hopper is full in the minecart it retracts the sticky piston with the fence post attached and fires the powered rail next to the detector rail , sending the cart on its way to the unload station where the minecart sits on an un-powered power rail with a hopper under it as soon as the hopper below the rail gets one item in it it fires the sticky piston with a redstone block, all the items are sucked from the hopper minecart above it. once the cart is detected as empty, the circuit moves the sticky piston and fires a pulse into my relay-delay which activates the powered rail and returns the minecart to the loading station for more chicken, the load/unload cycle is fast and it works well.
The auto sorter i got from Mumbo Jumbo,
The Relay Delay is a mechanism i came up with to change a continuous signal to a pulse of variable length. The basics are a comparator in subtract mode next to the top egg storage chest with a redstone torch 3 blocks away with redstone into the side of the comparator, this is powered to 14 from the torch. once the chest is full of eggs the signal from the coparator hits 15 thus overpowering the signal from the torch at the side, the signal from the comparator is at level one, this fires a string of repeaters set to delay by 4 clicks the signal finally returns to the side of another comparator set to subtract, this signal overcomes the signal from the chest and stops the outgoing signal that fired the killing pistons, thus retracting them and firing the dispensers at the far end to reload all the farm with chickens, I get about 340 raw chicken per cycle.
ALL I NEED NOW IS A LOAD OF VILLAGERS TO SELL THE CHICKENS TO, I FORGOT TO FILL IN THE BOX TO ALLOW STRUCTURES WHEN I BUILT THIS, D'UH