so ive been messing around with this for a few weeks now and i think i might be going down a rabbit hole that doesnt need to be this deep. basically i have 4 antennas — a 40m dipole, a vertical for 20/15/10, a 6m yagi, and a random wire i use for 80m and sometimes 160. right now i just have a manual coax switch and i get up and physically turn it every time i want to change bands which honestly isnt the end of the world but its getting annoying.

so i started looking at using an arduino mega to drive some relay modules and read band data from my radio (i have an IC-7300 so it puts out CI-V). the idea is it would just automatically switch to whatever antenna makes sense for the band im on. ive got the CI-V parsing mostly working, it reads the frequency fine. the relay board i got off amazon is one of those 8 channel 5v ones and it seems to trigger fine from the arduino outputs.

my question is whether its worth putting a raspberry pi in there too so i can have like a web interface to see whats going on and manually override from my phone. or is that just way too much complexity for something that should be simple. ive built a few arduino projects before so im comfortable there but ive never really done much with pi. anyone done something like this, curious how far down the path you went before you said enough.

honestly the arduino alone is probably enough for what you're describing. i did almost exactly this a couple years ago with an uno and a 4-relay board, CI-V on my 7300 too. worked great. the web interface thing sounds cool in theory but you end up spending more time fighting the pi's wifi and the apache config or whatever than you do actually using the radio. i tried it once and gave up after a weekend.

if you want a manual override just wire a rotary switch or a few pushbuttons in parallel with the relay outputs and handle it in the arduino sketch. way simpler. you can even add a small OLED to show which antenna is selected so you're not guessing. i used a SSD1306 128x64, plenty of libraries for it and it runs fine on the mega.

the one thing i would say — put some protection on those relay outputs if youre switching anything with RF going through it. i killed a relay board pretty quick before i figured out the coax switch contacts were arcing a tiny bit during a transmit and feeding back weirdness through the control lines. a few TVS diodes and some ferrite on the control cable sorted it out.

the pi idea is not overkill imo, really depends on how much you want to tinker. i run a pi 4 in my shack doing like 5 different things at once — flrig for CAT control, a little flask app for logging, and i have node-red running which is honestly amazing for this kind of automation stuff. you can do the antenna logic visually in node-red without writing much code at all and the dashboard gives you a browser interface automatically.

that said if you've never touched a pi before and you just want the antenna switching to work, yeah maybe get the arduino version stable first and add the pi later if you feel like it. no reason you cant have both, the pi can just talk to the arduino over serial and send override commands or whatever.