Hopper Timer only exchanges one item?

I've been using "hopper timers" to create long delays for some automated harvesters, using what seems to be a pretty standard method with comparators. So far this has been working well. But for the past few days I've been unable to build a new one.

When I start with the two mutually connected hoppers, I test them by dropping a stack of items into one of them to make sure it moves back and forth. But now any new such pairs of hoppers I create only move one of the items back and forth over and other, leaving the rest of the stack in the original hopper.

I've checked my existing ones and they're still functioning as designed. But any new ones seem to suffer this problem of not exchanging all of the items. Is there something I might be doing wrong?

Edit: As requested, here's a screenshot of a hopper pair:And here's one of the right-side hopper's contents:In this case, there are 10 redstones placed in the right-side hopper. That hopper keeps toggling between 9 and 10, and the left-side hopper keeps toggling between empty and 1.

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1 Answer

This is the intended way of operation. As both hoppers try to push their first item each way, only one ends up moving.

To make hoppers pass the whole load before starting to pass it back, you need to block the next (opposing) hopper until your current one is empty. The standard way (that you mention yourself) is measuring the contents of the current hopper with a comparator, and feeding this signal into the next hopper.

Here's SethBling's hopper clock from Minecraftwiki:

Hoppers are directed clockwise, right now the items are moving from top left hopper to top right one, which is still locked by a signal from top comparator, and is already sending a lock signal to bottom right hopper.

For more designs, see this section on the wiki.

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