so ive been messing around with this idea for a few weeks now and finally decided to just start building it. basically i have an old cd-45 rotator that i picked up at a hamfest for almost nothing, the controller works but its pretty dumb, no feedback, no way to connect it to anything digital. what i want to do is pull the pot signal from inside the rotator and feed it into an arduino analog pin so i can at least get a heading readout on a little oled display, and then eventually tie that into my logging software somehow.

ive got the voltage divider sorted out i think, the pot in there runs something like 0-5v across the rotation range which is pretty convenient for the arduino. my main question is whether anyone has done this and had issues with noise on the analog read — like is it worth throwing a small cap across the pot leads or just do software averaging on the readings. also thinking about a raspberry pi zero w instead so i can serve up a little web interface but that feels like maybe more complexity than i need right now.

anyway if youve done anything similar with rotator automation or just general shack automation stuff im curious what route you went

yeah ive done almost exactly this with a yaesu g-450a. the noise thing is real — i tried just averaging and it helped but i still got occasional wild jumps, ended up putting a 100nf cap from the wiper to ground and that cleaned it up considerably. also worth making sure your arduino ground is tied to the rotator controller ground or youll chase your tail forever with floating reference issues.

the pi zero idea is not overkill at all honestly, i went that direction after a while because being able to hit a webpage from anywhere in the house and point the beam is genuinely useful. just ran a simple flask app, nothing fancy. the latency from the web interface to actual motor movement is a little sluggish but for HF beams nobody cares. if you were doing satellite work or something fast-moving youd probably want something more direct.

one thing i wish id done earlier is add a soft stop in software before the hardware limits, learned that lesson the hard way when my heading got confused and the motor ran into the stop at full speed. nothing broke but it was not a good sound

the cap is probably fine but honestly for rotator pot noise i just do a rolling average over like 10 reads and it smooths out fine for display purposes. depends how twitchy your display is i guess. if youre using the heading for actual closed-loop control then yeah youd want to be more careful about it.

pi zero w is a solid choice if you want the network stuff. i use one in my shack for a bunch of random things — flrig over network, some basic gpio stuff for switching. just be aware the zero w can be a little slow for some things and the single usb is annoying when youre trying to set it up. get a hub or just use a pi 3 if you have one sitting around