So I'm enjoying another stint on Starbound since the last stable update, and discovered the joyous addition of elevators. (Yay!) In my eternal finickiness, however, while a simple XOR gate and two levers works just fine for the basics, something just BUGGED me about having an elevator with doors that don't close on the floor where it's not stopped at. I'm not all that good with wiring so this puzzled me for quite some time, but I finally figured out a way to make it work how I want it, so long as someone doesn't stand around flipping the switch repeatedly for funsies. All in all, the system ends up needing 1 XOR (+1 for every floor with two exits), 4 NOTs, 2 Countdown Timers and 2 DLatches, plus SMS's and buttons to toggle/call the lift - and makes it so doors close after you enter and start moving, and then only open again after you reach the top/bottom. It's crude but it works, so I figured I'd share it. Sorry about the messy wiring. ^^; Mind you, the delay is only really appropriate for long elevators, the countdowns would probably need to be replaced with Delay gates instead for a short one. Does anyone think it'd be possibly to simplify it someway? If not, hope someone finds this useful at least
uhmmm...looks cool, but I don't understand this at all. I used elevators once and all they did was go up and down constantly and at a fast pace. Do they behave in an acceptable fashion if you wire them up to levers and stuff?
Sort of. When you hook them up to a red wall button, there's a bit of an automatic on/off going on, where as a switch/level is a more permanent on or off state depending on the state of the switch/lever. For elevators, on = moving away from start point. Doors = open. Gates are a pretty important aspect for a lot of this. See, the thing with elevators is they usually have a switch at the top and a switch at the bottom. The problem is simply hooking the switches up to the elevator means if one switch is set to "on" the elevators moves to its on location, but hitting the other switch does jack all because the elevator is already powered. The X/or gate allows One to hook both switches into said gate, then the gate hooks into the elevator, now whenever either switch changes states at all, the elevator moves. Of course, if you're counting on the elevator to double as flooring for the top level, using a red button and a countdown gate ensures the elevator makes it to its destination when the button is pressed and hold there for a few additional seconds before returning to its off state. Using gates you can even create airlocks where one door is always closed if the other is open, or drain water from a room before opening another door (for underwater airlocks.) ...It's not easy to explain without pictures. Or a personal guide. It pays to build the switches, doors/elevators and gates and experiment with them one at a time.
Littleman does a great job explaining it. In the case of my system, once you flip the inner switch, all of the doors stay closed while the elevator moves either up/down, and then the appropriate doors open for the floor you've arrived at. The small buttons on the outside of the door simply act as another means of flipping the inner switches, since you can't toggle them through a closed door. (Ergo, it calls the lift) This is useful in case some random tenant toggled the lift to another floor, or to call it back up for yourself to ride down after another player has. In the end though it's all aesthetics - if I removed the doors and all the extra fluff, I could boil the system down to 2 levers and a XOR gate, which is the strict minimum I use for any elevator just so it's not constantly in motion.
I see...I think. Either way I am going to try to keep this in mind when I fiddle around with elevators again. I'd really like to try using them in a way similar to you have. Its hard to build a futuristic facility over a cave without using an elevator.
