so this started a few months ago when i got tired of manually logging every QSO and wanted something to just handle the boring stuff automatically. ended up grabbing a Pi Zero W off amazon and figured id hook it into my rig via the CAT interface and let it handle logging, maybe pull in cluster spots, whatever.

that was three months ago and now i have like four different arduinos scattered around the shack doing various things, a Pi 4 running fldigi and js8call simultaneously, and a whole mess of i2c sensors monitoring temperature in the shack because apparently that became important at some point. i also have a relay board switching my antenna between the HF rig and the VHF setup based on a python script that honestly i half dont understand anymore because i wrote it at midnight and never commented any of it.

its actually working pretty well but i feel like im one reboot away from everything falling apart. anyone else built out something like this? specifically curious if anyone has dealt with the CAT control stuff getting flaky - i'm using hamlib on the pi and every few days something just locks up and i have to restart rigctld. not sure if its a USB issue or what, using a cheap USB to serial adapter, maybe thats the problem.

yeah the cheap USB serial adapters are almost definitely your problem. i went through like three of those things before i just bought a proper SignaLink and stopped fighting with it. the ones with the CH340 chip are hit or miss depending on which linux kernel you're running - sometimes they work great, sometimes they just silently drop the connection and hamlib has no idea. you can usually tell if you check dmesg and see USB disconnect errors showing up every few days.

what i ended up doing for the lockup issue was just writing a dead simple watchdog script, runs every five minutes via cron, tries to poll the rig with rigctl -m 1 or whatever your model is, and if it times out it kills rigctld and restarts it. not elegant but it has been running for like eight months without me having to touch it. also worth trying the FTDI based adapters instead of CH340, they seem more stable with the longer-running stuff at least in my experience.

lol yes i have absolutely gone down this rabbit hole and i dont regret it but also my wife thinks im losing my mind. i started with just wanting a little LCD display showing band conditions and now i have a whole nodejs server running on a Pi 3B doing... a lot of things. half of which i set up and then forgot about.

the midnight python script thing is very relatable. i found one on my pi the other day that i have zero memory of writing and it was doing something with the rotator controller and i honestly couldnt tell if it was working correctly or not so i just left it running.