so ive been messing around with a raspberry pi zero W for the past few weeks trying to get it to handle some basic automation in my shack. mostly stuff like keying the amp when the radio goes into transmit, logging contacts automatically via rigctld, and eventually maybe pulling in weather data to display on a little OLED screen i've had sitting in a drawer forever.

got the rigctld talking to my IC-7300 over USB which was actually way easier than i expected, hamlib just kind of worked once i stopped second guessing the baud rate. the amp keying part though is giving me fits. im using a GPIO pin with a small relay board i had from an old arduino project and it works maybe 80% of the time but occasionally the relay just fires on its own when the pi boots. not a huge deal in testing but i really dont want that happening mid-contest or something.

wondering if anyone else has gone down this rabbit hole and whether there's a cleaner way to handle the GPIO state on boot - i think its floating but im not 100% sure how to pull it low reliably without it affecting normal operation. also open to just switching to an arduino nano for the relay control and having the pi just talk to it over serial, might be cleaner honestly

yeah the floating GPIO thing on boot is a known annoyance with the pi. what i do is set the pin as output and explicitly drive it low in the boot script before anything else touches it, you can do it in /etc/rc.local or just a systemd unit that runs early. there's also a config.txt option called gpio= that lets you set initial pin states before linux even fully loads, think the syntax is gpio=17=op,dl or something like that, look up the pi gpio= config option and it'll show up. that's probably your cleanest fix without adding more hardware.

the arduino for relay control idea isn't bad either though, i actually do something similar where the nano handles all the time-critical stuff and the pi just sends commands over serial. feels more reliable for anything that needs to respond fast or has safety implications. pi linux isn't realtime so if timing matters at all for your use case the nano approach makes sense.

i did almost exactly this setup about two years ago, IC-7300 and a pi 3B+ running wsjtx headless with remote desktop for when i want a gui. the logging automation part works great once you get used to it. my amp keying i actually just run off the radio's ACC port so i never dealt with the relay thing but i remember reading about that boot state problem on the raspberry pi forums, def a known issue.

one thing i'll throw out there - if you're putting an OLED on it look at the luma.oled library, way easier than trying to do it from scratch and it handles the SSD1306 driver stuff automatically. i have mine showing band, mode, and whether the cluster has any spots on my current freq which sounds dumb but is actually super useful when im just spinning the dial casually