Elevator Controls

[AnnaMayBelle]

I'm currently using Tekkit 3.0.3 to design an elevator intended to traverse the height of a tower that reaches the maximum height limit of the map. I've settled on using Railcraft's Elevator Rails to do this, since Railcraft 3.3.0 added a condition that placing a rail opposite the Elevator Rail will cause minecarts that stop on that level to be pushed onto the rail.

So far, I've set up a system where each floor will have a wall of buttons next to the elevator. Each button is tied to a Toggle Latch so the setting can be turned on and off. The Toggle Latch is then rigged to a lamp above the light to show which floor is selected, and also to a wireless transmitter that is synched with a wireless receiver on the appropriate floor. Hitting the button for Floor 3, for example, will turn on the redstone signal up at Floor 3, meaning the carts will now travel to Floor 3 before exiting onto that floor's rail.

I've run into two noticeable issues... For one, if you turn on Floor 4, and Floor 2 without turning off 4, you'll be sent to Floor 4. Secondly, I've been testing all of these controls based on having floor controls only on the ground floor. If I were to add these controls to each floor, then turning on or off the 'Floor3' button on one floor would have no baring on whether or not another floor has selected Floor 3.

I'd appreciate any input on how I can wire this. This is about the third wiring scheme I've been through, and I'm not opposed to ripping everything out and starting over if I have to.

[xaerie]

I may not fully understand what you are doing here but what if you put a detector rail on all of the floors that would reset the toggle latch on the bottom floor.

[AnnaMayBelle]

I'll look into how I'd manage that. I'll take some screenshots later to better illustrate my setup.

[AnnaMayBelle]

Belated, but here are those screenshots.

Ground-floor controls as seen by the user.

The back end of the controls.

The receiving end on each floor.

The whole setup as seen from a distance.

[Milk]

As for your floor selection issue, you can put them all on latches with repeaters on them, and have every button clear all of them. This way, after all the latches are cleared, the repeater will give a signal to the selected latch to flip it, and it'll be the new and only selection.

[AnnaMayBelle]

But how would I go about clearing the latches? I know I can make them flip, but how would I say "return all latches to this position"?

[Milk]

An RSNOR latch has 2 inputs: Trigger, and clear. I'm not sure if redpower has a logic gate for this, but you can certainly build one with vanilla redstone.

[AnnaMayBelle]

The problem with building in vanilla redstone is the size becomes prohibitively large... I'd like to not have to space out the buttons for each floor too far, since there's going to be so many of them. It's a very large building (I believe 65x65 were the specs we built from, and extending from 5 to the upper limit of the map), so I have a relatively large footprint to put the elevator in, but I'd also like to keep it to a minimal size since this rig will likely have to be built on every floor to provide floor-selection.

[Milk]

You could use wireless redstone on every button (could also probably all be on the same channel for one floor) and link it to the ground floor rig. That way, only the ground floor part has to be built.

[AnnaMayBelle]

Ooh I see where we could go with this... In fact, if every floor's buttons just pulsed wireless emitters, then all the innards that tell it what floor to select could be at a different location... All on one floor, or even in a neighboring building. I'm gonna work on some designs now.