Craft18

Bring Minecraft Redstone circuits to life using Craft18, our physical re-creation of the game’s “circuit” mechanics using only discrete analog components. Look ma, no microcontrollers! To build even more complex circuits, link the physical world to the virtual world using our custom game plugin and game-to-physical bridge!

In the open-world sandbox Minecraft, the Redstone system acts similar to real-life electricity, so why not emulate it with real-life electrical components? We’ve implemented the most important Redstone blocks, such as torches and comparators, using only discrete analog components. We never touched a single microcontroller or specialized chip!

As part of our implementation, we use open-drain logic (to replicate the propagation behavior of the game), a large number of Schmitt Trigger RC delay-line circuits (to replicate in-game timing), and a handful of 555 timers, comparators, and other logic chips to implement more specialized logical behavior. We’ve also 3D printed the physical blocks to exactly match the visuals from the game.

Additionally, we’ve implemented a bridge to the game itself, so our physical Craft18 circuits can be linked into a larger circuit built in the game. This is done using a custom Minecraft server plugin that captures Redstone states and creates a bi-directional USB-GPIO bridge to our physical system.

Redstone is often used as a tool to help teach logic understanding to children, and we hope that our physical recreation can help solidify this, as well as eventually bridging the gap from Redstone logic into building real-world circuits.

Overall, our project was a resounding success. We successfully implemented nearly all of the components we wanted, with behavior almost indistinguishable from the game itself!

https://github.com/asinghani/craft18