Inverters and Vertical Transmission
Ok so now you've mastered wiring right? And we know that wire can stair-step up and down. But what if we want to transmit a signal more than 15 blocks? What if we don't want to stair step up and down? Well, That's what this post is about. I'll teach you about inverters, and how to go up and down without having to make a staircase for your wiring.
For this lesson we will be using levers.
A
Lever
is an input device. It emits a full redstone signal (15 units) when it's on, and 0 when it's off. You can toggle it on and off by right clicking the lever.
Let's say we have a lever that we want to use to toggle something that's more than 15 blocks away. If we just use wire directly from the lever to the lamp, we won't have enough signal to reach the lamp, and it will always be off. Poor lamp :( All it wants to do is shine, but it's just too far away.
One way to get this signal from the switch to the lamp is to 'Repeat' the signal (You can use a redstone repeater to do this, but repeaters are interesting enough to deserve their own post. We'll use redstone torch inverters for now). If we place 2 solid blocks along our wire's path with redstone torches on the side facing the lamp, we've set up a torch repeater circuit. Now when we flip the lever, the lamp lights up, even though it's so far away. But how did that happen? Redstone torches can act as inverters too, not just a power source.
So what is an inverter? It's pretty simple. It converts a signal that's on to one that's off and vice versa. So if a block that a redstone torch is attached to gets a redstone signal, the torch turns off. Redstone torches can be mounted to the top and to the side of blocks, both can act as an inverter. This is why redstone torches never power the block they are attached to, it would immediately extinguish itself, and cause a never-ending on/off loop.
Ok now that you understand how inverters work, let's see how we can use them to transmit a signal up and down without having to build a staircase for wire.
It's easier to go up than down using inverters, but I'll show you both. To go up, we simply stack inverters on top of each other in a 1x1 vertical column. You'll notice that every other torch is off because the one below it is giving it a charge. So let's wire the bottom block to a lever, and flip it. What happens? All of the torches in the tower flip too, allowing you to toggle a circuit that's several levels above the switch, and we didn't need to build a big staircase for it. It's more compact this way too, think about how big of a staircase you would need to go up that high, vs climbing the 1x1 space through the vertical tower?
Torches can be placed on the side of blocks too, so we could build a tower to go up in a 2x1 space too.
Now that we've learned how to get signal up through a tower, lets see how to get it back down now.
This is slightly more tricky, but not much. We'll build a 3x1 tower first like this picture here:
on each side of the tower we have blocks with wire on top, and torches on the side. When the wire gets a charge, it turns the torch on that block off, which turns the next torch down on, and so on back down to the ground.
There is a similar 2x1 method for going down as well like this one:
I've set up all of these examples in a saved map, which you can download and try for yourself. Plus, because I'm a sneaky girl and I want to encourage you to download my maps, There are some EXTRA examples and building tips that aren't covered in this post featured in the map! The maps are always free, and there's no better way to learn than by seeing things for yourself.
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