so ive been messing around with a raspberry pi zero W for a few months now trying to get it to automatically pull my WSJT-X logs and push them to LOTW and QRZ at the same time without me having to sit there and do it manually every time. the zero is honestly underpowered for running WSJT-X itself but as like a little helper that just watches a folder and does stuff when files change it works fine.

right now i have a python script using watchdog to monitor the ADIF log file and when it detects a change it waits like 30 seconds (so the QSO is definitely complete) and then calls tqsl on a separate machine via SSH and also posts to QRZ via their API. its mostly working but occasionally it double-logs things and im not sure if thats a watchdog issue or something with how WSJT-X writes to the file - i think it might flush and then write again or something which triggers the callback twice.

has anyone done something similar or dealt with that double-trigger problem. i also have an arduino nano sitting around and was wondering if theres any reason to involve that instead of doing everything on the pi but i cant think of what it would actually add here

yeah the double trigger thing is almost certainly the file write behavior - a lot of apps do a partial write and then finalize and watchdog sees both events. easiest fix ive found is to track a hash of the last N bytes of the file or just keep a set of QSO timestamps youve already processed and skip anything thats already in there. the 30 second wait helps but its not bulletproof depending on how wsjtx is flushing.

as for the arduino question, no real reason to use one here. the pi zero is fine for this kind of task. arduino makes sense when you need fast real time GPIO stuff or youre interfacing with hardware directly like building a band decoder or controlling antenna relays. for pure software automation and API calls youre in pi territory all the way. i do use a nano in my shack but its literally just watching the band decoder output from my radio and switching a relay board, the pi handles all the actual logic and the arduino is just the muscle that flips pins fast.

i did something similar a while back but gave up on watchdog and just used a cron job every 5 minutes that diffs the current adif against a copy i keep and only processes new lines. its dumb simple and works perfectly, never had a duplicate since i switched. the pi zero might chug a tiny bit doing the diff on a big log file but honestly mine has like 8000 QSOs in there and it takes maybe half a second so whatever