ME Controller

Each Applied Energistics device attached to your ME Cable that manipulates Matter or Energy in some way or another, uses a channel on your cable. A single cable by itself can have up to 8 channels, so it can only support 8 devices. Once you add another device that uses a channel, all the devices on that cable will stop working.

To add more than 8 devices on your AE network you must craft the ME Controller. To get the Sky Stone Block used in the recipe you must smelt the Sky Stone which is what the Applied Energistics Meteorites are made out of. You only need to make 1 ME Controller for now.

The ME Controller acts as the central hub for your AE network. Each cable attached to the ME Controller will have its own channels available to it. Since you can place a cable on each side of the ME Controller, and each cable has 8 channels, that's a total of 48 channels.

If you need even more channels, you can craft ME Dense Cable, which can hold 32 channels. But you can't attach any devices onto Dense Cable, so you must have smaller cables branch out from the Dense Cable, while the Dense Cable branches out from the ME Controller.

To help determine how many channels are being used on your AE network, you can craft the Network Tool. Hold it in your hand and right-click any part of your ME network and it will tell you information about the system, such as the number of each type of device, how many channels are being used, and how much energy is being used.

To further assist in determining how many channels your devices are using, you can also upgrade ME Cable and Dense Cable into Smart Cable variants. These Smart Cables will show colored lines directly on the cable itself to visually indicate at a glance how many channels are flowing through that Cable. But these smart Cables require a lot of Glowstone and Redstone to make, so people usually hold off on this until they can actually afford it.