so ive been messing around with a raspberry pi zero w for a few months now and i finally got hamlib talking to my 7300 over usb which honestly took way longer than it should have but thats a whole other story. right now it just logs frequency and mode to a little sqlite database every few seconds which is kinda fun to look back at but im trying to figure out what else to do with it.

the thing that got me thinking was i saw someone on reddit who had their pi monitoring swr and temp inside the shack and would text them if something went wrong. that seems really useful especially since i leave things running unattended sometimes when im doing digital modes overnight. i have a few DS18B20 sensors sitting in a drawer from an old project and a basic SWR bridge i built years ago that has an analog output i never did anything with.

has anyone tied an Arduino into something like this too? im thinking the pi handles the logic and network stuff and the arduino does the analog reading since the pi doesnt have an adc. or is there a better way to do it — i know you can get i2c adc chips pretty cheap. just not sure what the cleanest approach is for something that needs to be reliable and not crash every week.

yeah the pi plus arduino combo is actually pretty common for exactly this reason. the pi is great for the heavy lifting but its a pain for anything real-time or analog. i use an Arduino nano as basically a sensor front end — it reads a handful of analog inputs and sends the data over serial to the pi every second or so. been rock solid for like two years now running WSPR beacon monitoring in my garage shack.

the ADS1115 i2c adc is fine too and saves you a whole extra board if you only need a few channels but honestly for what your describing the nano approach gives you more flexibility and you can add stuff later without rewiring everything. just watch your ground loops if your SWR bridge is anywhere near rf, took me a while to figure out why my readings were going nuts on 40m transmit.

i did almost exactly this last winter. the texting part is easier than you'd think, i used a python library called Apprise that can push to like a dozen different services. ended up going with ntfy.sh just because it was free and i didnt want to mess with twilio billing. the temp sensor integration with those DS18B20s is dead simple on the pi, theres a kernel module that just exposes them as files in /sys so you basically just open and read. SWR monitoring is where it gets trickier depending on how your bridge outputs the voltage but if its already giving you a clean DC level it should be fine through an ADS1115 like the other guy said.