so ive been messing around with this for a few weeks now and honestly not sure if im overcomplicating things or if this is actually the way to go. basically i have a pi zero w sitting on my desk doing nothing and i figured i could use it to run flrig, feed into cloudlog, and maybe do some basic rig control over wifi to my ic-7300 since it has that usb serial interface built in already.

the actual connection part wasnt too bad once i got the right usb otg adapter sorted, and flrig sees the rig fine most of the time. my problem is the pi zero just doesnt have enough horsepower to also run wsjt-x without turning into a space heater and dropping frames or whatever the digital mode equivalent of that is. so now im thinking maybe i split it — use the zero just for logging relay and rig control stuff, and keep wsjt-x on my main shack PC like before.

has anyone done something like this where you have a dedicated little linux box just handling the background automation stuff but not trying to do the heavy lifting for dsp? feels like it should work but im curious if theres a cleaner way to wire it all up. also kinda want to eventually add an arduino to read SWR from my antenna tuner and log that automatically but thats a whole other rabbit hole i havent fallen down yet.

yeah the zero is really not the right tool if youre trying to run anything that needs real time audio processing, it just doesnt have the muscle for it. what you're describing though — offloading just the rig control and logging relay to it — that actually makes a lot of sense and ive seen a few guys do exactly that. flrig in headless mode talking to cloudlog via its API works fine on a zero, cpu barely moves.

for the arduino SWR thing, if you go down that path just make sure youre reading the forward and reflected voltages from a directional coupler and not trying to tap into the tuner's internal signals directly, those can be weird depending on the tuner. i built something similar with a nano and an AD8307 log amp chip and it feeds readings over serial to a pi 3 which then pushes them into a little sqlite database. nothing fancy but its been running for like 8 months without issues. the pi 3 might be worth grabbing over the zero if you want a bit more headroom, theyre not that expensive anymore.

I've got a similar setup but I went with a pi 4 2gb because I got tired of fighting the zero's limitations. cloudlog is actually surprisingly lightweight once you're running it locally, the logging part never really stressed anything. my wsjt-x still runs on a windows machine though because I just got tired of dealing with audio on linux, every distro update seemed to break something with pulseaudio and I gave up honestly.

the split approach you're describing is probably the sane call. let the little machine do what it's good at.