Would it be a good idea to give the illuminated panels a sign upgrade? Name them or give them a sign upgrade to enable them to show text like a sign. Combine this with a level emitter and a redstone card and you have a sign that lights up when a certain amount of items is in the network. This could possibly be addon-territory though, or through some sort of computer integration.

Kinda similar to http://ae-mod.info/Features/0905/ As far a signs go tho.. something like the CC monitors and similar blocks are kinda king in that regards. We'll see.

I'd like to see it too! It'd be good if they could form kind of multi-block, for size defenitions. 2x1 or 6x2 kind of monitors. And also it would be kind of cool to see text formating like in biblio craft's Fancy Sign.