So our minecraft subforum generally doesn't get much love, despite many of our members actively playing the game both on and off our server.

This thread is dedicated to small redstone contraptions- in my opinion, large projects should get their own thread, but small ones that don't deserve that kind of power should go here :)

---

I'll start things off with my design for a fast, bidirectional tripwire repeater. Michael2_3B showcased a larger monodirectional design that he had designed and built up on the cemetech-mc server. Together we compacted the design down to 4x2x2 (width x height x length, excluding two blocks for holding the armor stand from falling, and one air block required for a piston monostable to work), and mirrored it along its central axis to make it bidirectional. and the design is still smaller than the first attempt hehe


This is primarily useful in places where you care about how things look (ew, gross!)- the tripwire is virtually invisible at height and can even be disguised as a power line.

People who are in the cemetech-mc discord with access to the #minecraft channel can check out the development logs starting here.

I'm glad I got this idea going! It's been fun. I'll set up the latest design on the server soon to mess around with it some more in multiplayer.

I'm glad we could get it so fast and compact, my previous versions took a while for the signal to clear out of the whole line.

Here I made a 4 way, so any signal coming in through one of the tripwires gets sent out to the 3 other tripwire lines. Note, the signal does not loop back onto itself because of the monostable circuit.


And here is a minimal telephone/power pole design that could look good on a survival world:

It's not exactly disguised, but it looks good I think anyway. It gets bulky if you try to conceal it more.

I've been playing around with iPhoenix's and Michael2_3B's designs and playing around with serialization. I've come up with a way to convert 4 bit serialized signals coming from a tripwire line into a 4 bit serialized redstone signal. The benefit to this is that redstone offers a much faster form of transportation. A single redstone line only using repeaters and redstone dust can transmit at a rate of 10 bits per second, while the tripwire method I only managed to get to 1.25 bits per second, due to slow reset speeds.
https://youtu.be/rG4bOtFu0UI

I made this, it’s a 4 bit serial transceiver. It can both send and receive signals all on the same panel, thus the name. It transmits over the tripwire at about 2 bits per second I think, there’s 10 ticks between each pulse.

With these devices, you could actually put as many as you want along the tripwire chain (within render distance) and they’d all be able to communicate with each other. One transceiver would transmit data to all the devices connected.

Anyway here’s the video:

I was asked to give a review of the latest and greatest parallel-serial transceiver (which alternates between two serial lines to transmit the data twice as fast as normal serial)

Here's Michael's video over it, he gives a great rundown of the build and how it works:


Unfortunately, the build is quite large, so I set about making it smaller.

I took a stab at compacting the button panel, and I ended up with a 1-wide tileable design:

To tile it, you just need to alternate activator and powered rails at the bottom. They don't actually transmit any signal, they just serve to update a budded piston.

I also added a reset line and some extra stuff to make it easier to read serial binary data from the panel.


This is still about half the volume of the previous solution

Edit: I realized that if you're doing serial with dust you can make a really simple transmitter with observers. The first one sends the wakeup bit, and the latter ones send the data

fghsgh's (not so recent) builds! (but they've never been posted publicly before so it's kinda okay)
(click any image to view full-size)

First, this spiral staircase:
closed:

open:

open (better angle):

Okay so basically, you can power it both from the top and from the bottom, and it opens up a spiral staircase. You can see the pictures. It's also pretty small (only one block outside the piston footprint, which is necessary here because some of the pistons can't be powered otherwise). For powering it from the top, place a lever or button as shown in the screenshot and activate it. The piston underneath will be powered and cause it to drop. From the bottom it's just a reusable button (which was an afterthought, honestly).

One interesting thing this makes use of is this fancy block swapper which makes clever use of alternating sticky and regular pistons to swap the blue and red stained glass with very little wiring:

(on the previous screenshot, you can see it in the top right)

Anyway, this was developed before they changed the redstone mechanics in 1.16 (several years before that, in fact), and it broke in 1.16. However, a single target block came to the rescue and even made it .1s faster!

Downloads: pre 1.16 litematic and 1.16 litematic (the pre 1.16 one also has color coded circuitry if you're interested in that, and most of the 1.16 one is identical).


Then, this hidden crafting table:
hidden:

not hidden:

Many hidden crafting tables have the frustrating property that they either 1. only keep the crafting table level with the floor, so it doesn't pop out, or 2. that they need to be close to a wall. This one is neither of those. It works on both 1.16 and before 1.16, though in 1.16 you can remove a single button that is used for redstone wire redirection and make the redstone wire a dot.

This one uses this very small vertical double piston extender, which is, granted, not the fastest in the world, but most of the small ones are like that. (it's also been slightly modified to shave off another block)


Download: litematic.


Next up is this water line creator which only uses 3 slimeblocks and 2 sticky pistons (which is interesting if you don't have a slime farm yet):

Update the bottom observer to start it. There was also a way to do it using 2 honey blocks and 2 slimeblocks but meh.
Download: litematic.


Staying in the theme of water channel creator slimeblock flying machines, this one creates two channels with an air block in between which makes it easy to ride a boat there. Useful for reaching the outer End islands if you don't have elytra yet. In that case, be sure to build it high enough so you don't hit an End City on the way (happened 3 times over 20000 blocks at Y=96) It uses 8 slimeblocks, which yes, is more than using the previous one twice, but you get the added advantage that it is AFKable and you don't need to worry about the two machines getting out of sync. This was made before honey blocks were added. Otherwise it would probably be possible to make it use even less slime.

This one was too long ago to remember how to use it. Sorry. Play around with it in a creative world for a bit maybe.

A cool thing though is that this is one of the few builds that use glazed terracotta as a movable non-sticky block, which is that property only glazed terracotta has.

Download: litematic.


And finally, this freaky and totally useless block mover that uses very precise timings to move blocks in one direction:


And yes, that roundabout way of powering those pistons is absolutely necessary. Both pistons are powered for 5 game ticks and unpowered for 3, with one game tick when they are both powered on each end. This causes the block (or multiple blocks, because it can also transport more than one block at a time) in the middle to only stick to the forward moving slimeblocks. This means each block moves forward 5 blocks per second, and it is the fastest way of transporting blocks without zero tick pulses. These are also chainable if you alternate putting the lines of slimeblocks horizontally and vertically (or you can put one at the bottom and one on the side, then one on the other side and one at the top).

Download: litematic.


(future people: if you live in a horrible time where cdn.fghsgh.xyz is down, everything is on archive.org)

Good work, fghsgh!

Here's the latest progress on the transceiver project:

Whew, it's been a little while since the last post here! So _iPhoenix_ actually finalized his design for the transceivers, and I went ahead and redesigned it to use note block inputs!

In addition, I also designed the devices so that they could send and receive on the left side of them as well, making it so that the devices could be directly in line with each other. Of course, you can also just use 2 identical transceivers on opposite sides of the tripwire, but that's not as aesthetically pleasing.

Anyway, I explain everything since my last 4-bit transceiver in this video here:

Although not as impressive as certain peoples entire redstone computers, here's a 2 by 2 bit multiplier I made out of observer logic (no redstone dust).





As you can see on the display, I have entered 11x11, or in other words 3x3, and on the output I get 1001 which is 9.

I have been busy making other fun devices as well, such as this infinitely tileable ripple carry adder:



It can be as many bits long as one wants, theres no limitations besides the ripple carry speed. But it can also break easily depending on how new bits are input.

Messing around with stone generators.

I realize this thread is 2 years old, but I thought I'd share a video I made on my signal strength memory arrays that I created:



Basically, using a vertically stacked chain of comparator memory cells, I've created some FIFO (First In, First Out) arrays that you can enter unique signal strengths into, and you can pop the values out.

Something I didn't mention in the video is that you can stack/chain as many memory cells on top of each other as you want, as long as the clear line is repeated to reach every memory cell.

I'm not sure if there are many practical uses for this, unless maybe you are making a minigame or computer of some sort.

Anyway let me know your thoughts!