Support for CC1101 radios
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I wanted 433MHz support to improve performance in an environment challenging to 2.4GHz, so I bought a bunch of cheap CC1101 radio modules and set about writing a HAL driver for this chipset. I probably should have bought some RFM69 modules, but I wanted the challenge of supporting another popular radio.
I took inspiration from some of the other radio drivers, and now have a fully featured driver that is very stable and I have a small network of nodes running nicely now. Nodes are AVR and the gateway is ESP32.
Power consumption is very similar to the RF24 radios (~20mA on full power xmit and a couple of uA in sleep). It also includes adaptive power control to automatically set TX power to just the necessary level.
My fork with cc1101 branch are in my repo, I have also added some documentation (some AI assistance here as I got lazy) . I've gotten the code pretty clean but probably still has a little development cruft left in it.
Would there be any interest in merging into the core?
Happy to take feedback, PRs, etc.
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Nice. I know there are RFM69's, but I've seen quite a few requests for the CC1101. Always good to have options.
I did something similar with the WIO-E5 chips in my repo. The E5 is not quite ready for prime time, but the basics are working.
I have many MySensors nodes, and still adding more. Good to see some new code for it. -
I wanted 433MHz support to improve performance in an environment challenging to 2.4GHz, so I bought a bunch of cheap CC1101 radio modules and set about writing a HAL driver for this chipset. I probably should have bought some RFM69 modules, but I wanted the challenge of supporting another popular radio.
I took inspiration from some of the other radio drivers, and now have a fully featured driver that is very stable and I have a small network of nodes running nicely now. Nodes are AVR and the gateway is ESP32.
Power consumption is very similar to the RF24 radios (~20mA on full power xmit and a couple of uA in sleep). It also includes adaptive power control to automatically set TX power to just the necessary level.
My fork with cc1101 branch are in my repo, I have also added some documentation (some AI assistance here as I got lazy) . I've gotten the code pretty clean but probably still has a little development cruft left in it.
Would there be any interest in merging into the core?
Happy to take feedback, PRs, etc.
@buxtronix thanks for the effort! Why not make a PR? 433MHz is a quite unique value proposition of MySensors. I'd recommend a quick search through the open issues on MySensors github, maybe some CC1101 support was requested already. In any way, I'd encourage to raise a PR to the development branch. Who knows, if we get some people engaged, maybe we can release a new official version of MySensors with improved hardware support.
Thx, Dirk. -
I finally got around to creating a PR into the official repo, as it's been running reliably for some time so I believe it's ready.
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So almost time to create a 3rd gateway? :) I'm switching over to RFM69 for now, due to it's high range. Although it's significantly slower than NRF. So Curious about the performance of CC1101 any stats on power consumption?
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The CL got accepted and merged, so now MySensors officially supports CC1101!
Yes CC1101 is slower than NRF (the bitrate tops out at 250k, NRF starts at 250k), so I imagine this would increase
power consumption a little simply due to the longer airtime. However idle power consumption is comparable.Penetration is certainly better, I have been running an NRF network for nearly a decade, but wanted to add a 433MHz network due to wall penetration issues, hence this feature.
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Thank you Buxtronix
