so i finally caved and ordered a raspberry pi zero 2 w after seeing a few posts here about shack automation and honestly i dont even know where to start. ive been playing around with an arduino uno for a couple years doing basic stuff like controlling a relay board for antenna switching but the pi feels like a whole different beast.

my current setup is a fairly basic HF station, ic-7300 as the main rig and a kenwood 2m/70cm for local stuff. what i want to do eventually is get the pi talking to the 7300 over USB for CAT control and then maybe tie in some sensors — like a temperature sensor in the shack because the amp gets hot and ive been meaning to set up a fan that kicks on automatically. also maybe logging integration somehow but i havent thought that far ahead yet.

has anyone actually done a full shack automation setup with a pi and is it worth the headache or should i just keep using the arduino for the simple stuff and not overthink it. feels like every project i read about online eventually turns into a 6 month rabbit hole and i end up with half finished stuff on my bench

yeah ive gone pretty deep on this exact thing. pi zero is fine for light stuff but if youre doing CAT control and want to also run something like fldigi or wsjtx in the background it can get sluggish. i ended up moving to a pi 4 for the main shack controller just because the zero kept choking when i had too many things polling at once.

for the 7300 specifically the USB connection is pretty straightforward, rigctld from hamlib handles the CAT side and you can write python scripts that talk to it no problem. the temp sensor stuff is almost easier honestly, DS18B20 is what most people use, one wire protocol, theres a million tutorials. i wired mine up to trigger a 12v relay that controls the exhaust fan on my amp and it took maybe an afternoon including me screwing up the wiring once.

the thing that took the longest was writing clean logging integration. i wanted it to sync with my logbook software and that was honestly more software headache than hardware. if you just want the fan automation and basic CAT stuff youll get that working in a weekend probably.

dont ditch the arduino for the simple relay stuff, thats exactly what its good at. i run both — arduino handles all my physical switching and sensor polling because its rock solid and doesnt need to boot up, and the pi handles anything that needs network or a real OS. they talk to each other over serial and its been running for like two years without me touching it.

the pi rebooting during a contest or an EMCOMM activation because of some software hiccup is not something you want to deal with. the arduino just sits there doing its thing no matter what.