so ive been messing with this for a few months now and i think i finally got it to a point where its actually usable. basically i gutted an old TV rotator - one of those channel master units from like the 80s - and wired up a Pi Zero W with a small relay board and an ADS1115 ADC to read the pot position. the whole thing talks back to my shack PC over wifi and i wrote a really janky python script that serves a little web page so i can point the antenna from anywhere in the house.

the relay board was like $4 off aliexpress and the ADC module maybe $3. honestly the hardest part was figuring out the dead band on the rotator motor, it kept hunting around the target bearing and just grinding. ended up adding a hysteresis window of about 5 degrees and that mostly fixed it. still overshoots sometimes when its cold outside i think the pot gets noisy.

anyway if anyone wants the rough code i can throw it up on github or just paste it here. its definitely not clean code but it works. been using it for 40m and 20m with a 2 element yagi for a few weeks now and no problems so far. curious if anyone else has done something similar and whether you went arduino or pi for the control side, i went back and forth on it for a while

nice work on the hysteresis fix, that hunting problem is super common with those old rotators. i did something almost identical a couple years ago but used an Arduino Mega instead of the Pi because i didnt need wifi and the Arduino just felt more reliable for something thats always on. no linux to lock up, no SD card to corrupt, just sits there and does its thing.

the ADS1115 is a good call for reading the pot though, way better resolution than the Arduino's built in ADC especially if youre running it at 3.3v. one thing i found is that putting a small cap across the pot wiper and ground helps a lot with the noise, like 0.1uf or so. made a huge difference for me in cold weather.

id definitely be interested in seeing your code even if its messy. im thinking about adding a second axis for elevation for EME work down the road and having something to start from would save a lot of time.

channel master rotators are tanks honestly, good choice for a donor unit. ive got one thats been spinning a tribander for probably 15 years now. never did automate mine but this is making me think about it. does the web interface let you click a bearing on a compass rose type thing or is it more like just typing in degrees