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none|800px Photo (c)2010 Felice Strong-Baker. Used with permission __

Welcome to Project Searchlight!

Project Searchlight is a family of small electronics and embedded firmware projects targeted at providing interesting and useful functionality for the Model Railroading Hobby. Much of this is in the idea or planning phase, but hey, it's a hobby.

If you find something useful or interesting, or if you would have advice or would like to help, feel free to contribute.

Keep in mind, I fully understand that there are a number of commercial and open source products that do many of the things that these projects do. If you like those things better, cool. Part of the fun of this hobby is "scratchbuilding" stuff. Well, same here. We'll be scratchbuilding stuff. Maybe my ideas are useful to ou, maybe not.

Disclaimer

All of the stuff posted here amounts to just random musings and hobbyist tinkering. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. The author and other project members and contributors assume NO RESPONSIBILITY AT ALL for anything that might happen to you while using the information or implementing the ideas described here. No warranty is expressed or implied or even hinted at that any of this stuff is even correct or accurate, let alone useful for any purpose whatsoever.

You're on your own, but if you find some of this useful, that's nice. If you fry your favorite locomotive or set yourself on fire, please take responsibility for your own actions. You've been warned.

Now, back to the fun stuff.

Sub Projects

There are several ideas floating around here, some mine, some belong to my friends. Project names are placeholders. I'm open to suggestions on better names.

• [Searchlight_Controller]: A custom, micro-controller based signal controller for my personal layout. It implements a microcontroller-based "brain" for a switch control panel. One side effect of this project will be a micro-controller core that can be used for other projects.
• [Searchlight_Signal]: A microcontroller (or PLD) based logic block that implements a freelanced, semi-prototypical signal system for the town's "interlocking plant". Also included in this project is a scratch-built 2-LED dwarf signal.
• [Searchlight_Power]: A small LED lighting power circuit based on a switching regulator. This allows folks to efficiently power LED lighting (at +3.3V or +5.0V) from the DCC Track Bus, or from any 12-18V DC or AC source. This will also provide a reusable power source block for other projects.
• [Searchlight_ATX]: An adaptor board for converting a standard ATX12V power supply to model railroad use, with a few features.
• [Searchlight_Panel]: A custom turnout control panel system for a friend's layout. Uses a capacitive discharge unit (CDU) to drive Atlas switch machines, and features a remote, wall mounted LED display.
• [NT_Signals]: Working title for a project to provide a very simple, easy to install, modular ABS-like Block Signaling system for use in NTrak or similar modular layout systems.
• [Virtual_Sound_Decoder]: This is a module that will be part of the JMRI project. It provides a software emulation of a sound decoder that responds to your locomotive throttle inputs. Not quite even in "Alpha" yet, I'm putting some information about it here, pending full integration into the JMRI project.
• [Third_Party_Research] Of course, these devices need to be compatible with devices and products made by other people. The pages here will aggregate the various notes and research done on those third-party devices in the context of interfacing them with my circuits in a useful way.

Where applicable, these projects will be made compatible with DCC, LocoNet, and OpenLCB.