Would be nice if display plates could read from a circuit wire and set their display

This would indeed be cool and I probably would find it useful as well! Not sure how to work with circuits but I think I'll try to explore this once I figure out how to migrate!

+1 up. It would be very good.

+1 as well :)

+1 Even just showing the strongest signal would be great. (Even better, and probably not feasible, do like Nixie Tubes, and chain them together so we can see the top several items.)

There are no events for circuit networks, so you'd need to use on_tick to do stuff with it. it's a fairly slow operation to do on scale, so if you DO use it, it's better to limit the number of updated entities per tick.

On the being cool part, I am with you.

Just copying over the two cents of Deadlock989 (original mod author) from a discussion over at my fork about this same topic:

"The display plates are entity type simple-entity-with-owner which is incapable of receiving circuit network signals. You would have to use something else, like a lamp.

The entity's sprites would need to be changed to include a circuit connection point.

It would have a non-insignificant UPS impact. You would need to track every display's current render ID because the API doesn't provide a quick way of getting the render IDs attached to a specific entity target. Probably the best way to handle it is like Nixie Tubes which essentially entails that the more displays you have, the slower each one updates.

Basically you're talking about making a new mod."

+1 for the circuit wire thing... I understand the argument

a new mod it may be, but it's also the only one for me