so ive been messing around with a raspberry pi zero W for the past few weeks trying to get it to handle some basic shack automation stuff. right now im just running a python script that polls my FT-991A over CAT and dumps the freq and mode into a sqlite database every few seconds. works fine mostly but occasionally the serial connection just drops and i have to go restart the script manually which is kind of defeating the purpose.

what i actually want to do eventually is tie this into a bigger thing where the pi is watching for spotting cluster data and cross referencing with what band conditions look like on my sensor — i have one of those ADS-B style ionospheric noise floor loggers running on an rtlsdr that a guy on here pointed me to a while back. the idea being the whole thing would basically tell me hey this band looks good right now, you have a new spot on 17m or whatever.

but before i get there i need to sort out this serial dropout issue. im using pyserial with a USB to ttl adapter, nothing fancy. anyone dealt with this? also curious if people think the zero is enough compute for this or if i should just throw a pi 4 at it

the serial dropout thing is almost definitely a USB power issue on the zero, those things are notoriously fussy about current especially if youre running wifi at the same time. try adding a small powered hub or just tape a 100uf cap across the 5v rail on the adapter and see if that helps. also worth wrapping your pyserial reads in a try/except and having it automatically re-open the port — i do something like that for my IC-7300 and it just silently reconnects in like half a second, barely noticeable.

for what youre describing the zero will probably struggle once you start adding the cluster parsing on top of everything else. i moved to a pi 3B+ for my logging stuff and it just feels more comfortable, not maxing out the cpu all the time. the zero is fine for like one focused task but juggling serial, wifi, a database write loop and then eventually http requests to pull spot data is going to start getting messy.

yeah i did something similar a while back though i used an arduino mega as kind of a middleman between the radio and the pi, the arduino handles all the serial timing sensitive stuff and just passes clean data over USB to the pi. works great and means if the pi crashes or reboots the radio interface doesnt go down too. might be overengineering it for your use case but its been solid for me for about two years now