so i finally caved and bought a raspberry pi zero 2 W a few months back and ive been slowly building out this whole little ecosystem around my shack and honestly i dont even know where to start describing it. basically i got tired of manually switching between my HF rig and my logging software whenever i changed bands so i started messing around with hamlib and a python script that polls the rig via CAT and updates a little LCD display i had sitting around from an arduino project

the arduino side of it is handling some relay switching for my antenna tuner bypass - nothing crazy, just a couple of 12v relays on a ULN2003 driver board that the pi talks to over serial. took me way too long to figure out why the pi's UART was conflicting with the bluetooth module but once i disabled that in the config it all just worked

anyway the part im stuck on now is trying to get it to automatically log spots from the DX cluster and cross reference them against my DXCC worked list and then flash the display if its a new one. ive got the telnet connection working fine but parsing the spot data is kind of a mess, different clusters format things slightly differently and my regex is catching maybe 70% of them. anyone done something similar or have a cleaner approach to parsing cluster spots

yeah ive been down that exact rabbit hole, started with just CAT control and somehow ended up with a whole pi 4 running flrig, cloudlog, and a custom node-red dashboard that my wife now refers to as "that thing that blinks"

for the cluster parsing - honestly just use pyhamtools or look at how DXtelnet handles it. the spot format is supposed to be standardized but youre right that it isnt, AR cluster and CC cluster both do slightly different things with the comment field especially. what i ended up doing was writing a much more lenient parser that just grabs the callsign and frequency and throws away anything it cant confidently parse rather than trying to extract every field. gets me like 95%+ hit rate and the ones it drops are usually garbage spots anyway

the arduino relay switching thing is smart by the way, i did something similar for my bandpass filter switching. just make sure youre not browning out the pi when those relays click, learned that the hard way with some really weird SD card corruption

not to derail but what CAT interface are you using between the pi and the rig, just a USB to serial adapter or did you build something? i keep meaning to do this with my 7300 but every time i look into it i get overwhelmed by the options and just go back to manually logging like its 1987