I haven’t posted anything in a while. I’ve hit a small developmental roadblock in Akvanta, namely that I have no idea where to take it next. So my recent project has been development of a redstone computer in Mojang/Microsoft’s Minecraft. Just so we’re all clear- it’s not a simple prospect. I expected it to be complicated, but the sheer amount of detail that is actually involved in manipulating redstone signals is mildly absurd. After three days of research, watching how other people had made it work, building components, tearing things down, and even following a tutorial through to completion, I have made several loops back to the beginning. I built the entire system following a tutorial on YouTube and found out during programming that something was extremely wrong in multiple parts of the system. A program designed to test the “goto” commands on the processor, which basically tell the processor which line of the program it should be reading, lead to a program designed to count upward from one flashing lights in a pattern that I think I can safely say was just nonsense. I then tested a program that would add two numbers together, then output them onto a four-bit binary display. That program just crashed. The goto commands involved in moving from line to line jumbled the program terribly, so I decided it was probably better to just start from scratch. Tonight I spent about two hours assembling an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) consisting of a four-bit adder circuit with a five-bit display. The operator simply pulls the switches representing the number they want on two panels, one for each number going into the operation. The system is not the most efficient design ever created. It takes about a second and a half for the five-bit display to change to reflect new input, and the only current operation is addition. My next project will be adding a subtraction operation to a similar ALU. From there I plan on trying to construct a computer again from the ground up.