"Item Collectors" is great and simple... but I wish I could control them being on/paused with a redstone pulse... otherwise they just ALWAYS pick up stuff in the area. And while that's a great and useful tool, being able to pause them would make them great for automating thing.

To provide a specific use-case - I am trying to automate an in-world tiered crafting recipe from the Spirit mod.

The result of each tier is used an ingredient in the next tier. In addition to the item being crafted, the crafting process results in an explosion that destroys everything in a 3x3x2 area, so the result must be collected from a distance. This is where I would like to use item collectors.

I can detect which tier the crafting process is on and send a redstone signal to activate/deactivate a collector for each tier, but it requires a collector that responds to a redstone signal. Without that, the collector will automatically collect the previous tier's result before the next tiered item can be crafted, stalling the process.