so i've been messing around with a raspberry pi zero W for the past few months trying to get it to handle my logging and CAT control for my IC-7300 and honestly its gotten way out of hand in the best possible way. started simple, just wanted rigctld running so i could use log4om without having to manually enter freq every time. that worked fine after like an hour of fighting with the USB serial permissions (had to add myself to the dialout group, classic)

but then i started thinking, why not add a little OLED display to show current freq and mode, pull wx data from the nearest APRS-IS gateway for my area, and also tie in my rotor controller. now i've got a pi zero with like 4 things hanging off it via a small USB hub and im honestly not sure the zero has enough juice for all of it but it seems to be working so far

the one thing im really struggling with is the rotor integration. ive got a cheap yaesu G-450A and i built a little arduino nano interface board for it that reads the pot voltage and converts it to a heading but getting that to talk cleanly to rotctld has been a pain. the arduino sketch is fine, i can see the heading over serial no problem, but rotctld keeps dropping the connection randomly, maybe every 20-30 mins. no idea if its a baud rate thing or just the zero being overwhelmed

anyway curious if anyone else has done something like this, especially the rotor part. or if youre running a pi for shack automation generally i'd love to know what youre using

yeah the dialout group thing gets everyone at least once lol. on the rotor dropouts - i had almost the exact same issue with rotctld and an arduino mega i built for my prop pitch motor setup. turned out to be the arduino's USB-serial chip losing sync, the CH340 ones are kind of notorious for this. if your nano has a CH340 (the cheap clone ones almost always do) try dropping your baud rate to 9600 and also add a small delay in your arduino loop, like 50-100ms, so it isnt hammering the serial buffer constantly. that fixed mine completely

also the pi zero W really does struggle when you start piling on USB devices plus wifi at the same time, the wifi is on the same chip as a bunch of other stuff and it causes weirdness. if you can swing it, even a pi 3A+ is way more stable for this kind of shack controller stuff. i run one headless with a small script that restarts rotctld automatically if it crashes, just a simple bash loop in a systemd service, nothing fancy

i dont do the rotor stuff but im running a pi 4 for my JS8Call gateway and it handles logging and a few other things. one thing that helped me a lot was just using a powered USB hub instead of pulling everything from the pi itself, the zero's power situation is sketchy enough without USB devices trying to draw off it too

the OLED display idea is cool though, what library are you using for that, luma.oled or the adafruit one? i tried adding a small display to mine a while back and gave up because the fonts were ugly and i couldnt be bothered to figure out custom rendering at the time