I've started using the rather good Astroberry on my Pi 3B and I'm using the SW USB dongle which replaces the handset and acts as EQMod. Works fine on my HEQ5. All uses INDI and Kstars / Ekos to bring it all together but was actually pretty straight forward, and no Python coding skills needed 😉 The Astroberry even acts as a wifi module for your gear and lets SkySafari connect to it and control everything from your phone / tablet.
I am very interested in this statement where you used Synscan dongle through RPi. I have been trying to connect for some time without any success. Wondering if you would be able to share the method in which you used to connect everything?