Thermal Expansion really is good. One thing a lot of people miss is how compact you can make everything. This is what I have for my automated material intake...
Ignore the wooden chests and DSU's on the right, I'm just going to talk about the machines on the left.
I'll start with the middle machine which is the Pulveriser. You can just see the cobble piping behind the hopper feeding into it, that's the feed from my quarry intake through an item tesseract. Using that piping and diamond pipe filters I feed all the pulverisable ore into the iron chest. The hopper (in vanilla from 1.5 I think?) autodrags stuff down from the chest and puts it into the pulveriser. That crunches the ore and feeds it into the right hand machine without any need for further piping. The right hand machine is the Powered Furnace which dumps the ensuing ingots into the gold chest on its right. All easily setup within the TE interface and as compact as it gets.
The machine on the left is another powered furnace, that's for Nether Ores which is another mod by PowerCrystals who also does the awesome MFR mod. That simply adds ores to the Nether but in a different form to the normal world ore. You have to run them through a furnace first to "cook off" the outer layer which leaves you with a piece of normal ore. By putting it to the left of the pulveriser we can throw those ores into the wooden chest and they are autodragged into the furnace, pulveriser, furnace sequence and we get our lovely ingots at the end. If you don't use the Nether Ore mod then the middle and right machine and associated hopper/chests is all you need.
For what it's worth, here's the backside view
The item tesseract on the right sends out the mats from the quarry (which isn't that far away actually, it's on the left edge of what you can see on the minimap) and I only left the long lead-in to the first ore filter so I could see what was coming up for a start so I could check I hadn't burgered up my filters. The second filter (on the left) has Redstone, AE Quartz rock and dust, lapis and diamond to send to the same ingot chest the automated ore system feeds into. Everything else carries on to the dirt and cobble DSU's and at some point I'll probably add a sand and gravel DSU pair.
The next project is to play around with MFR a lot more and get some automated farming going on. Or possibly set a lava pump going inthe Nether to fill a railtank so I have a huge cushion before I work out how to do an MFR automated biofuel power system. Or get an AE network running. Or get started on Galacticraft as my son really wants to visit the moon in that. Sheeeeeeeeeeit, so much to do! /Clay