so ive been messing around with a raspberry pi zero W for a few months now trying to get it to handle some of the boring stuff at my station — mainly auto-logging contacts to my cloudlog instance and eventually maybe triggering my antenna relay board based on what band im on. got the CAT control talking to my 7300 over USB and for the most part it works but every couple hours or so the serial connection just kind of dies. not fully dies like the port disappears, more like it stops responding and i have to restart the python script. checked dmesg and dont see anything obvious, no USB errors or anything like that.

im using pyserial and the baud is set to 19200 which is what the radio wants, flow control is off. ive got a powered hub between the pi zero and the radio because i read somewhere the zero doesnt like powering much off its own USB. still getting the hangs though. anyone else been down this road with a pi and a 7300 specifically? wondering if this is a known thing or if im doing something dumb

yeah the pi zero USB implementation is a bit janky honestly, ive had similar headaches with it and serial devices. one thing that helped me was adding a keepalive poll in my script — just query the rig ID or something every 30 seconds so the connection doesnt go idle. some radios and some USB-serial chips really dont like long silences and the 7300's virtual COM port can be a bit moody. also worth checking if you have a udev rule set up to lock the device to a specific path like /dev/ic7300 or whatever, sometimes the port name shifts between restarts and the script is actually talking to nothing without realizing it. that one bit me for a solid week before i figured it out.

i swapped to a pi 4 for my shack automation stuff and a lot of the flakiness i had on the zero just went away. might be overkill for logging but the extra horsepower means i can run a few other things on it too — i got fldigi, a little web dashboard, and my rotor controller all on the same box now. the zero is fine for simple stuff but USB on it really is its weak point. also are you running the full raspbian desktop or lite? lite made a noticeable difference in stability for me when running headless, less garbage running in the background fighting for resources