so ive been messing around with an arduino mega for the past few weeks trying to get it to handle my antenna switching automatically based on which band the radio is on. the idea is to read the band data output from my IC-7300 (it spits out band info over USB or you can use the ACC port) and then fire the right relay to connect whatever antenna makes sense for that band.

i got the basic relay logic working fine, like i can manually trigger relays through the serial monitor no problem, but im struggling with parsing the CI-V data reliably. sometimes it reads the band correctly, sometimes it just does nothing or picks the wrong one. im not super experienced with parsing serial data in arduino code so maybe im just doing something dumb. anyone done something similar with an icom? or even a different radio, just curious how you handled the data side of it.

also thinking about eventually moving this to a raspberry pi just so i can add a little web interface to control it remotely but that feels like scope creep at this point lol

yeah i did almost exactly this with a 7300 about a year ago. the CI-V stuff can be a pain, the timing is fussy and if you're not handling the echo correctly it'll trip you up. the 7300 echoes back everything you send it which catches a lot of people off guard. what baud rate are you running? i found 19200 to be pretty stable for polling. also are you polling for band info or waiting for the radio to volunteer it? polling is way more reliable in my experience, just hit it every 500ms or so and parse the response. happy to share some of my parsing code if you want, its nothing fancy but it works.

the raspberry pi idea isnt really scope creep if you think about it, i mean the pi can do everything the arduino does plus the web interface, logging, maybe tie into cloudlog or something. i went straight to pi for my shack automation stuff and used Flask for a little local web page. granted you gotta be more careful about GPIO current limits compared to arduino and you need to make sure the thing boots cleanly after a power outage which took me a while to sort out with some systemd service config. just something to think about before you get too deep into the arduino side if you know you want the web stuff eventually