I was thinking about making a Redstone Consultancy, where I would have open model or cut-away builds for redstone devices. This way if you were trying to build a redstone device, say a 3x3 piston door, you could come and take screen shots of how it's put together so you could build it for yourself in your build. I'm posting this thread to gauge the interest before going ahead with this build. Now a couple things, 1st if I do this, I was hoping for the support of management in that a warp could be set up to the site so everyone could use it, and 2nd these are not necessarily original build, but instead useful things that could be found on-line, you just wouldn't have to go looking for them, they'd be here instead. I would supply the materials for all of the examples, and it would be for community benefit.
I think you could show people the basic concepts of redstone, but I think everyone has a different way to build a certain thing. For instance, I am almost certain my design for a piston door and your design for a piston door would be nothing like each other (other than the door part). But if you showed that you need to shove the stone blocks around with pistons and that those pistons need to be powered and unpowered at the right times in order to do that, people could probably figure it out from there and integrate it with whatever they're working on.
That's part of what I'm trying to do, I've found, that certain circuits in redstone are harder to understand than others, and have found on occasion that I spend hours looking on youtube for videos on how to do a certain thing. You are precisely right when you say there's more than one way to do something like a piston door, I can think of 5 different designs as I write this response, each one very different than the other, but by putting a couple of them here in a spot where we can go to see the concept, our players can learn the basic concepts of what makes them work. I'm counting on the creativity of our players to take these designs and concepts to make them their own and to make them better. Most of what I'll be displaying won't be complete machines, but rather circuits that can be used to make other things, like pulse extenders that can take a one pulse button signal and extend that power to 8 ticks or 12 tick and then shut off, use this on a basic walk through double piston door or iron door, and you'll never have walk-through issues again. Just things to make our redstone better. Here're pulse extenders:
