so ive been messing around with this idea for a while now and finally started actually building it out. basically i want the arduino to handle switching between my vertical and my yagi automatically based on what band i'm on, pulling the band data from my rig via the CI-V interface. i have an IC-7300 so thats at least relatively straightforward to read from.

i got a nano clone off ebay for like 3 bucks and its been sitting on my bench for two months. finally wired it up to a relay board i had laying around and wrote some pretty rough code to parse the CI-V packets. its... mostly working. the band switching logic seems fine but every now and then it just decides to switch to the wrong antenna for no obvious reason and i cant figure out if its a timing issue in the code or if im getting noise on the serial line or what.

has anyone gone down this path before? curious if raspberry pi would have been a smarter choice here, maybe running hamlib or something. the arduino is simple which i like but im wondering if im fighting it on the serial parsing stuff when a pi could just handle all that more gracefully with proper libraries.

yeah done almost exactly this with a 7300, the CI-V stuff is pretty well documented but the timing can bite you. what baud rate are you running the CI-V at? i found that if i had it set too high and my parsing loop wasnt tight enough id get corrupt packets and the band detection would go haywire. dropped it down to 9600 and added a little debounce delay before acting on a band change and it cleaned up a lot of the random switching.

also worth putting a 100 ohm resistor on the serial line and maybe a small cap to ground if you're running any relays near the arduino. relay coils can throw out enough noise to mess with the uart if youre not careful, learned that the hard way. pi would work too but honestly the arduino is fine for this, you dont need linux for switching a few relays.

i went the pi route for something similar and honestly it was overkill for just antenna switching. spent more time messing with the OS and dependencies than actually building the thing. if i were doing it again id stick with an arduino or maybe an ESP32 if i wanted wifi in the mix for remote monitoring or whatever. the ESP32 is still cheap and has way more horsepower than a nano without dragging in all the linux overhead.