Fourteen Day Announcement Machine

FairyPrincessSerenity

Empress of Light
So what I put together is a device that sends a message to chat every morning and every evening. Well, that's what I initially built. Then I got the idea to chain messages together on an alternating loop of messages. So I built this thing. It's designed to send a different message every morning and evening by use of the actuators and the dart traps hitting the projectile-sensitive pressure plates. The pressure plate triggers the announcement board as well as closing up the inactive block hole and opening a new hole on the left. It can be extended to have more messages or shrunk to have less of them. It activates by use of day and night sensors on different tracks - the day machine is on top and the night machine is on bottom. All of the dart traps activate at the same time, but only the one with the hole will hit its target.

The only flaw in this machine is its projectile-activated pressure plates, so keep all projectiles and companion cubes away from it unless you want to have to fix it.

Here is an image with and without wires.

Fourteen Day Announcement Machine.png
 
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Nice use of announcement boxes with (what I would call) a linear counter (or distributor, depending, etc). :)

A handy way for players to better keep track of the passage of time, while playing. Days of the week flying by like Cure lyrics: "Monday - blue.", "Tuesday - grey.", "Wednesday - grey also"... What does yours say?
 
AWESOME! Download link plz!

I can't exactly do that. See, the world has a literal world's contents of ore and materials I got from mining it all with a DCU. I wouldn't want to upset the trading board even more than the Builder's Workshop already has.

Besides, it's simple enough to build from the picture alone.

Nice use of announcement boxes with (what I would call) a linear counter (or distributor, depending, etc). :)

A handy way for players to better keep track of the passage of time, while playing. Days of the week flying by like Cure lyrics: "Monday - blue.", "Tuesday - grey.", "Wednesday - grey also"... What does yours say?

Since mine chimes off every morning and evening, I set announcements themed for that time of day, like "Do I smell bacon?" and "A new day means a new fishing quest. Chop chop, slave." on the morning signs.
 
I really love that this is such a simple design, too. Since it's time based, rather than light based, one could hide it in the ground and not have much of a worry of Companion Cubes and projectiles (at least most of them) being pesky! I may do this on my main world, because I always forget that fishing quest. =/
 
With the addition of day and night sensors, my only original invention has now become obsolete. It's a shame, but what can you do.
 
I was wondering about creating a kind of counter and here is a simple design for it! Already getting more ideas :)
 
You can avoid the reliance on projectiles by using a faulty lamp cycler; the total space taken is the same:

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Didn't check out the faulty lamp... How does it work exactly? The description for the faulty lamp says it randomizes input so i assume there's 50/50 chance for it being either active or not. So I assume that when the lower input is turned on, but the faulty lamp returns a deactivated input the mechanism won't work? Or it will always work?

Nevermind, got the answer in another thread. Looks good :)
 
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Didn't check out the faulty lamp... How does it work exactly? The description for the faulty lamp says it randomizes input so i assume there's 50/50 chance for it being either active or not.

So I assume that when the lower input is turned on, but the faulty lamp returns a deactivated input the mechanism won't work? Or it will always work?
Here's how the faulty lamp works:
  • Placing a faulty lamp overrides the logic gate type (whether or not the gate sends a signal is determined entirely by the faulty lamp; the type of gate is irrelevant).
  • When the faulty lamp receives a signal, the probability of the gate sending a signal is determined by the number of ON lamps under the faulty lamp, over the total number of lamps under the faulty lamp (so all OFF means 0% chance of a signal, and all ON means 100% chance of a signal).
  • Placing lamps above a faulty lamp is possible, but (as far as I can tell) pointless (it doesn't seem to influence its behavior in any way, and they can't affect the gate).
So if you wire a sequence of faulty lamps like this, each activation will fire each gate in sequence. If you want to experiment with this sort of thing, just use a switch instead of a logic sensor and watch the ON lamp cycle around.

If you wire a faulty lamp sequence like this instead:

Capture 2016-05-24 02_18_36.png

Capture 2016-05-24 02_18_40.png



You get a binary counter; if you think of OFF as "1", then it counts up; otherwise, it's counting down. By wiring something to the final gate, you can make it so it only activates every 2^N times a signal is received; in this specific example, flipping the switch will send a message, and then it will take an additional 16 flips of the switch for the message to get sent again. Using only a single one of these gates can let you make a switch only send a signal every time it's flipped in a specific direction.
 
Using the properties of a complex logic gate that manipulates probability, I have put together a more complicated model of the Announcement Machine. It's a wee bit larger in size, so I'm putting the image in a spoiler tag.

Each day and night has a chance to ping one of two Announcement Boards for the active group. The top Announcement Board is set to activate 10% of the time and the bottom Announcement Board is set to work the other 90%.

I've spent the last three hours building the Fourteen Day Announcement Machine Omega instead of sleeping.

Fourteen Day Announcement Machine Omega.png
 
You know, for all the work it take, this would be a pretty awesome way to add a calendar to Terraria based off of our real one. :)
 
You can do a 7-day announcement machine by either having every other board set to announce nighttime, or removing half the announcement boards and using a faulty gate as a rising-edge pulse generator, linking the output of that to the faulty lamps of the other gates.

Or...do the day/night sensors only send signals one way? I was under the impression that it pulsed "on" one way, and "off" the other way, with both sending two signals either way, but one just appearing on or off depending on which one it is.
 
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Or...do the day/night sensors only send signals one way? I was under the impression that it pulsed "on" one way, and "off" the other way, with both sending two signals either way, but one just appearing on or off depending on which one it is.
Nope; they each only send one pulse: the daytime sensor whenever night turns to day, and the nighttime sensor whenever day turns to night. If you want to send a signal for each event, you need both sensors.
 
Hi, i'm new in this group, and I was looking for a moon phase detector, I found this entry before joining so I couldnt see any pictures, based on the description I made this similar build:
Capture 2016-05-30 10_07_51.png

Capture 2016-05-30 10_08_02.png

I guess it does the same, at first i was thinking on using bunny statues and logic gates, but thanks to you i have a better way to make the moon phase detector (this is not just for those that dont have or pay attention to the item that already provides this information), the purpose of this is to writte down on the announcement box the different items one can get out of NPCs during moon phases, something like "moon phase X, items available: Y, Z" , anyway, thank you so much.


Edit: just saw @MageKing17 's contribution about the lamps, gonna try them right now.
Edit2: thanks a lot MageKing17, very useful.
 
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I got an idea to combine my probability bias gate found in this post with the equal opportunity branching gate presented by @DicemanX found in this post to expand the output capabilities of my machine tremendously with a lesser amount of overall space taken up by the device. image is in the spoiler with a short explanation to follow.

64 Day Announcement Machine.png

The machine starts with an input from a day or night sensor (pending the time of day of course). This goes into the 90/10 probability gate. 90% of the time, it'll send a signal to the top row. The other 10% of the time, the bottom row. Each row has a potential to randomly produce one of 64 different outcomes, represented by the Announcement Boxes. I could've gone considerably further and had an output of 128 or more, but there is no way I can think of that many messages to set. This machine is overall represented by two of these machines. One for the daytime, which does not display its wires, and one for the evening, which does. They are both identical circuits through and through.
 
jaw dropped...

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im a moron. i just made this and was wondering why my messages where going backwards (right to left)!!! without thinking i didnt realize it was suppose to go right to left and not left to right!!!

I was wondering about creating a kind of counter and here is a simple design for it! Already getting more ideas :)
hmmm... might try this out instead now.
 
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