This looks like a perfect skeleton for bringing Minecraft redstone to an ascii game like Dwarf Fortress. Very cool! Especially if you could design "sub-circuits" by zooming in, sort of like the chips in Robot Oddysey[0] or in the super circuit maker mod for Minecraft[1].
That's really interesting. I will look into that.
Right now, subcircuits are created by using "libraries" to define custom characters (typically letters).
[0] http://www.formauri.es/personal/pgimeno/temp/RO/stereorecord...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/supercircuitmaker/top/