Salutations, dear IndustrialCraft² Forums! Esteel once again, distributing an idea that's been rolling around for some time now. I want to take a moment, however, and express my grief and disappointment that my suggestion for the Improved Booze System was met with much enthusiasm and positive remarks, but ultimately faded into the background due to inactivity. I'd still like to see that thread gain activity, but I can be content knowing that it received high prestige within the forum. Moving on to the task at hand. The term "Circuit Board" seemed like a fairly simple concept to me, so I performed a search of the forum, and to my surprise and slight dismay, this returned no results! I attempted a few variations, but still to no avail. Therefore, I apologize if this has been implemented as a suggestion before, as I sincerely attempted to locate a similar idea.
This idea was spawned from a distaste in attempting to wire either redstone or IC wires with very limited space. Usually, my hair-brained inventions will end up working -- at the cost of miles and miles of lost block real estate. Simply to create a 3x2 piston door, my most compact design is still bulky because of the unnecessarily complex redstone wiring. My errors with crossing wires in IC items also tends to infuriate me, due to that same limitation of space. This is where the circuit board idea was born. I dreamt up this idea for a pressure-plate-like item that could be placed upon any surface, like the side, bottom, top, ect. This plate would then have an interactivity which opens a new interface, offering only a 10x10 item grid, highly resembling an inventory screen.
- Circuit board
3 are crafted by using 2 sand and one Electronic Circuit in the center row, horizontally: Sand, Circuit, Sand.
Within the 8x8 space of the item (the outter layer is grayed, making the grid go from 10x10 to a workable space of 8x8 -- this outer area is solely for circuits entering or exiting), redstone and copper wires may be placed the exact same way that they could be placed on the ground. One redstone or wire would take one space in the grid, along with two new items -- an Interface Node and an Isolator Node. I will discuss these two new items below:
- Interface Node
This new item could be crafted by crafting 1 redstone and 1 copper wire together in any pattern. This node will take up a 3x3 space on the board, and is used to directly power the air block that the plate sits within, the same as if redstone or wire were where that Circuit Board with the Interface Node sat. An Interface Node may accept or release power, such as to accept power from a button or plain redstone placed on the ground, or to release power to a piston the circuit sits on. Alternatively, the node may accept power from a generator, or release the power to a load the node board is adjacent or attached to, such as a luminator or machine.
- Isolator Node
This node is critical to making this suggestion useful. Five Isolator Nodes are made by Redstone and Sand, in any pattern. This node may be dyed, and when placed upon the board, redstone and wiring place upon this 1x1 node will not connect to a node of a different color. This means that redstone or wiring on a red isolator line will not connect to redstone or wiring (respectively) on a blue isolator line.
Board Connectivity
Two boards that are adjacent, meaning an edge in common, will transfer power across lines placed on the outter gray edge of the board, illustrated below:
Onto benefits and downsides:
Pros:
1. System allows for highly complex or heavily paralleled wiring without losing huge amounts of real-estate.
2. Allows for vertical redstone without changing vanilla items.
Cons:
1. Extremely costly to create, because one circuit board of redstone requires 10 to move across the board once, and only covers one block of actual conduit.
2. Extremely easy to break a complex system.
That should about cover everything that is needed to be covered. As usual, if anyone has any questions, comments, or something they want to add or change, I'm all ears. Brewmaster Esteel, raising a mug to another day in the forums! Cheers!
