so i finally caved and bought a pi zero 2 W a few months back after seeing a post somewhere about using it to control a remote antenna switch and honestly i cant believe it took me this long to mess with this stuff. been a ham for like 20 years and never touched single board computers before this.

anyway i got the GPIO pins wired up to a relay board (8 channel, cheap amazon thing) and im controlling my antenna switch remotely over the network now which is great but i started thinking about what else i could do and now ive basically got a whole list of half-baked projects. one thing im looking at is feeding my IC-7300 CAT data into the pi and then using that to automatically log band and mode and maybe cross reference with a bandplan to flag if im transmitting somewhere dumb. probably overkill but seemed like a fun problem.

i also picked up a cheap arduino nano for a separate project - building a little CW keyer with adjustable speed using a pot, nothing fancy, just wanted to learn how to do it. the code took me way longer than i expected but it works now and its kind of satisfying having built something instead of just buying an off the shelf keyer.

curious if anyone else here is doing this kind of stuff. feels like theres a big overlap between the maker community and ham radio that doesnt get talked about enough on these forums. what projects have people actually finished vs just started and abandoned on a shelf (guilty of the latter more than once)

oh man yeah ive gone pretty deep on this. started with a pi 3B doing remote SDR stuff with rtl-sdr and then one thing led to another. right now i have a pi running flrig and fllog headless in the shack and i just SSH in from my laptop in the other room which sounds lazy but its actually really nice when im doing digital modes and dont want to be sitting at the radio the whole time.

the relay board thing is solid, i did almost the exact same setup for sequencing my amp and preamp so they key up in the right order. had to add some flyback diodes because i was getting weird resets on the pi when the relays clicked and i think the inductive kickback was causing noise on the power rail. small ceramic caps and the diodes sorted it. worth checking if you haven't already especially if you ever see the pi doing anything weird right when a relay fires.

the arduino keyer project is a fun one. i built one a while back based on the K3NG keyer firmware which is pretty full featured if you want to add more stuff to it later, supports a lot of different keying modes and has iambic A and B which some guys are picky about. anyway good luck with it, once you get one project working you'll never stop

just want to say the CAT logging idea is not overkill at all, i wish more people thought about that stuff. i spent an embarassing amount of time once transmitting on a frequency i thought was 40m and was actually... not. anyway. automation saves brains.

im mostly a contester so my use case is a bit different but ive been experimenting with using an arduino mega as basically a band decoder that reads the BCD output from my radio and then switches filters and amps accordingly. its way faster than doing it manually and no more forgetting to switch the amp band when i spin the VFO in a hurry. the code is pretty straightforward, mostly just reading digital pins and writing to output pins based on a lookup table. if youre already comfortable with the nano you'd pick it up fast.