Since 2020 has been the year of “stuck at home, all day every day”, earlier this summer I finished restoring and installing my Union Switch & Signal H-2 searchlight in my back yard. I still didn’t have a good way to control it, however. When Iowa Scaled Engineering was sending off another set of circuit boards for fabrication, I decided to add a fun project to the order in addition to all the various new product ideas we were working on. What project? A WiFi-enabled searchlight signal controller, of course!

If you’ve ever wanted to control your 80+ year old railroad signals with your smartphone, have I got the project for you.