10-22-2014, 11:27 PM
Minecraft name: LicenseTooThrill
What do you like the most about redstone?: The possibilities.
What's a thing you have made which demonstrates redstone knowledge?:
I first learned redstone last night. I woke up at 5am this morning from a redstone dream. I went to building my first contraption. This contraption lead me through a lot of learning in a short amount of time that ultimately lead me my mod idea - to simplify redstone (and ultimately increase it's speed) by condensing wiring (like in the Redstone Paste mod), creating new redstone components for commonly used interactions, and ultimately create the PCB bench - a workbench that you can "enter" and load into a small, flat alternate minecraft world with dynamic ins and outs, where you can build a redstone signal processor, exit the workbench, and use it as your own 1-block circuit board.
What does it do?:
This contraption was an oversized beast with lots of fat to trim - it was my first, after all. I started with an automatic wheat farm - simple enough first project. It was great, but I got lazy. So I made a minecart system (through a lot of trial and error - I'd never used minecarts before either) to return the crop from the base of the hopper that collected it back out to the outside world. But then I thought... sorting system. So after some trial and error, I created a sorting system that put seeds in one chest, wheat in another, and got rid of everything else. It's about 8am at this point.
Then I got cocky -- I made a no-maintenance wheat farm, and this is where my programming skills came in handy. I treated the redstone system like a computer program, creating an elaborate oscillator to act as an if/then statement to check that all parts of the farm were working properly. If they were, then once the minecart reached the hopper, it would wait there until the chest was full (I had to reverse engineer this one by making the hopper into an activator rail of sorts). When the minecart returned to the surface, the flood gates were shut off, and sorting began. One the items left the minecart, a song played to notify you that the items have almost arrived -- mind you, I made the entire farm function off of a single button sitting right next to the chest - uber laziness. Once the items were sorted fully, a dinger went off and a redstone lamp turned on until you removed the items from the chest.
Well the farm worked, and it was dandy, but then I realized my complex oscillator circuit was mostly redundant, aside from the comparator checks. So I created a new oscillator using only 6 blocks space and 1 repeater, 1 torch, 1 level. That's when I realized the power of a custom PCB mod, and decided I wanted to build it to create a scratch programming language with redstone. I was done at 11:30
To be honest, I don't know much about binary or bits or bitshifting for that matter, and I've never built a redstone adding machine - obviously - and I most certainly would fail the entrance trial - but I want to learn these things from here out; not just as a minecraft player but as a programmer, a curious scientist, and a guy who really wants to create a custom If/Then/Else circuit mod in Minecraft. Oscillators are powerful - radio and TV would not exist today without them - but I think creating a system of checks that can receive input from anything in the minecraft world is even more powerful. A input that can be fueled not just by redstone, but by sheep, chicken, zombies, melons, bonemeal, dandelions, sunlight, rain, cows, and even cookies. A system like that would make Minecraft possibilities endless. You can create a Minecraft mod without ever closing Minecraft.
I only ask for your help, or if not, then a point in the right direction. Last night I didn't know comparators existed, I had no idea how redstone torches transmitted signal, I thought powered rails meant they held power, and yet 17 and a half grueling, sleepless hours later, I'm explaining my self-resetting, self-debugging, lazy-man's auto wheat farm that operates on a single push of a button, desperately hoping for some guidance, or even some inspiration.
Take it easy on the noob
Do you agree with the rules?:
One-hundred percent.
Thank You for your consideration,
~John Lardinois
What do you like the most about redstone?: The possibilities.
What's a thing you have made which demonstrates redstone knowledge?:
I first learned redstone last night. I woke up at 5am this morning from a redstone dream. I went to building my first contraption. This contraption lead me through a lot of learning in a short amount of time that ultimately lead me my mod idea - to simplify redstone (and ultimately increase it's speed) by condensing wiring (like in the Redstone Paste mod), creating new redstone components for commonly used interactions, and ultimately create the PCB bench - a workbench that you can "enter" and load into a small, flat alternate minecraft world with dynamic ins and outs, where you can build a redstone signal processor, exit the workbench, and use it as your own 1-block circuit board.
What does it do?:
This contraption was an oversized beast with lots of fat to trim - it was my first, after all. I started with an automatic wheat farm - simple enough first project. It was great, but I got lazy. So I made a minecart system (through a lot of trial and error - I'd never used minecarts before either) to return the crop from the base of the hopper that collected it back out to the outside world. But then I thought... sorting system. So after some trial and error, I created a sorting system that put seeds in one chest, wheat in another, and got rid of everything else. It's about 8am at this point.
Then I got cocky -- I made a no-maintenance wheat farm, and this is where my programming skills came in handy. I treated the redstone system like a computer program, creating an elaborate oscillator to act as an if/then statement to check that all parts of the farm were working properly. If they were, then once the minecart reached the hopper, it would wait there until the chest was full (I had to reverse engineer this one by making the hopper into an activator rail of sorts). When the minecart returned to the surface, the flood gates were shut off, and sorting began. One the items left the minecart, a song played to notify you that the items have almost arrived -- mind you, I made the entire farm function off of a single button sitting right next to the chest - uber laziness. Once the items were sorted fully, a dinger went off and a redstone lamp turned on until you removed the items from the chest.
Well the farm worked, and it was dandy, but then I realized my complex oscillator circuit was mostly redundant, aside from the comparator checks. So I created a new oscillator using only 6 blocks space and 1 repeater, 1 torch, 1 level. That's when I realized the power of a custom PCB mod, and decided I wanted to build it to create a scratch programming language with redstone. I was done at 11:30
To be honest, I don't know much about binary or bits or bitshifting for that matter, and I've never built a redstone adding machine - obviously - and I most certainly would fail the entrance trial - but I want to learn these things from here out; not just as a minecraft player but as a programmer, a curious scientist, and a guy who really wants to create a custom If/Then/Else circuit mod in Minecraft. Oscillators are powerful - radio and TV would not exist today without them - but I think creating a system of checks that can receive input from anything in the minecraft world is even more powerful. A input that can be fueled not just by redstone, but by sheep, chicken, zombies, melons, bonemeal, dandelions, sunlight, rain, cows, and even cookies. A system like that would make Minecraft possibilities endless. You can create a Minecraft mod without ever closing Minecraft.
I only ask for your help, or if not, then a point in the right direction. Last night I didn't know comparators existed, I had no idea how redstone torches transmitted signal, I thought powered rails meant they held power, and yet 17 and a half grueling, sleepless hours later, I'm explaining my self-resetting, self-debugging, lazy-man's auto wheat farm that operates on a single push of a button, desperately hoping for some guidance, or even some inspiration.
Take it easy on the noob
Do you agree with the rules?:
One-hundred percent.
Thank You for your consideration,
~John Lardinois
