CUL vs CC1101

Hello. I am getting the bits together to control eQ-3 MAX! thermostats (and possibly my Vaillant boiler with eBus, if that has been sufficiently reverse engineered). I read on the wiki that connecting a CC1101 transceiver module straight to the host computer’s SPI pins gives the most reliable communication. I’m a bit confused about this because the CUL effectively does this anyway by using an Arduino processor between the CC1101 and the USB interface. This presumably provides responsiveness and buffering. Is the hardware/software performance of the Arduino not good enough to avoid packet loss?

Although I don’t want to buy a CUL as it is rather expensive, my host’s SPI is not free so I am thinking of making my own CUL from CC1101 and Arduino module.

Many thanks.

Hey,

Yes, but there is USB in between which makes it more unreliable. If the USB and network load (on the Raspberry Pi network is connected over USB) are low, there should be no problems. In practise both work fine. I’m using the CC1101 for production and the CUL for testing.

Cheers,

Sathya