so ive been messing around with an old prop pitch motor setup for a while now and the controller i built is functional but its basically just a manual pot and some relays, nothing fancy. started thinking it would be pretty cool to tie an arduino into it so i could just type in a heading and have it go there automatically instead of watching a needle and guessing.

i found a few projects online doing something similar but most of them are using the yaesu GS-232 protocol which is fine i guess but i dont really need all that, im not doing any EME or anything where i need sub-degree accuracy. just want to point a yagi roughly at something and have it stop there without me babysitting it.

anyone done something like this? im decent with arduino, built a few things with it already, have a nano and a couple unos sitting around. main thing im trying to figure out is the feedback side - right now i have a pot on the rotator shaft but im not sure how linear it actually is across the full 360 and whether that matters much if im only aiming for like plus or minus 5 degrees accuracy.

also considering swapping the arduino out for a pi zero at some point so i could run a little web interface from it but thats probably overcomplicating things for now

yeah done almost exactly this about two years ago, its totally doable and honestly not that complicated once you wrap your head around the feedback loop. the pot linearity thing is real but in practice if you calibrate at like 4 or 5 known headings and do a simple interpolation in the code its more than good enough for anything except serious weak signal work. i used a 10-turn pot geared down to match the rotation range and it was pretty stable.

one thing that bit me early on was the motor coasting past the target when i just cut power, so i added a braking relay that shorts the motor leads momentarily when it gets close to the target heading. works way better than just switching off. took me an afternoon of head scratching to figure out why it kept overshooting by like 15 degrees every time.

the GS-232 stuff is actually worth implementing even if you dont need the precision because then you can use it with logging software and things like that down the road. its not that much extra code and you can just add it on top of whatever you build. but yeah for manual use a small OLED and a rotary encoder input is all you really need honestly.

pi zero for a web interface isnt really overcomplicating it tbh, thats basically what mine does and it took maybe a weekend to get something usable running. flask is pretty lightweight and you can have a simple bearing input form going in like 50 lines of python. the pi talks to an arduino over serial which actually handles all the real time motor control stuff because i didnt want to deal with latency issues from linux on the control loop side.

that two board approach sounds redundant but it works really cleanly, pi handles the UI and logging, arduino handles the hardware. worth thinking about if you go that route