so ive been messing around with a raspberry pi zero w for the past few weeks trying to get it to control a few things in my shack automatically and i gotta say its been more of a rabbit hole than i expected but in a good way mostly

right now i have it pulling weather data and keying a relay to turn on my fan when the shack hits a certain temp, and i also have it monitoring my power supply voltage over i2c with one of those little INA219 breakout boards. works pretty well once i sorted out the address conflicts which took me an embarassingly long time to figure out

what i really want to do next is hook it up to rigctld and have it log bands automatically based on time of day, like switch to 40m in the evening without me having to remember. my radio is a 7300 so the CAT interface should be pretty straightforward but ive never actually done anything with rigctld before. anyone have a starting point for that or a script i can steal lol

also curious if anyones done anything similar with an arduino instead — i started with an uno for the relay stuff and moved to the pi when i realized i actually needed network access, but maybe theres a better way to split the work between the two

yeah the INA219 i2c address thing gets everyone the first time, you have to pull the A0/A1 pins to set alternate addresses and the datasheet buries that info like they dont want you to find it

for rigctld and the IC-7300 its honestly not bad once you get it going. make sure you have hamlib installed and then just run rigctld with the right model number, i think the 7300 is model 3085 but double check that. then from python you can just open a socket to localhost 4532 and send commands as plain text which is kinda weird but it works fine. theres a hamlib python wrapper too but i always just use raw sockets because i understand whats happening that way

the split between arduino and pi is something i do too — i use an arduino nano as basically a dumb i/o expander over serial, pi handles all the logic and networking, nano just toggles relays and reads sensors. keeps the timing stuff reliable and you dont have to worry about linux doing something stupid at the wrong moment

ive got a 7300 also and did something similar a while back, rigctld works fine with it over the USB cable. one thing that tripped me up was making sure the baud rate in the radio menus matched what i had in the rigctld command, mine kept timing out and i couldnt figure out why for like two days

the automation angle is cool but honestly once i had CAT control working i went down a whole other rabbit hole with fldigi and js8call integration and kind of forgot about the original project haha. its that kind of hobby i guess