( click image to enlarge )
Project: Redstone Digital Clock
Having played Minecraft on-and-off since alpha, I’ve experienced most of what the game has to offer. My favorite activity in the game is to create crazy redstone contraptions. Doing so has forced me to learn a ton about electronic circuitry and logic gates. My most impressive construction so far is this redstone digital clock that I made in 2019. I’ll describe how it works by referring to the first picture above. In the bottom-left corner, there is a redstone clock pulse that loops through repeaters endlessly in a circle. Each full loop cycle sends out a pulse to the next section of the contraption, consisting of pistons and redstone blocks. Individually, these each form a T-flip-flop. Since they are wired in series, this effectively allows the contraption to count the number of times the clock pulse has completed a loop and store it as a binary array. From there, we can figure out how much time has passed by multiplying the duration of each loop by the number of clock pulses that have occurred.
The tall middle section of the contraption is a vertically stacked series of logic gates. Each layer contains multiple combined logic gates that only collectively output a true signal when the T-flip-flop stored binary array corresponds to a specfic hour of the day. That signal is wired to a labeled sign with a number and a redstone torch representing the hour of the day. If the torch above a specific number is on, that means it is that time of day. Calibrating the clock can be done by calculating the number of seconds that have passed since 12am and then dividing that by the amount of time it takes the clock pulse to complete one cycle. With that, you'll effectively have the number of clock pulses that you need to match the T-flip-flop array to. Convert that number to binary and then adjust the state of each T-flip-flip accordingly. Here is a copy of the save file if you'd like to check it out!
- James
