Communicating between the eZ430-Chronos watch and PC (via CC1111 USB AP)

Hi,

I have a new protocol that I want to implement and test using the eZ430-Chronos. I can get the two Chronos watches to talk using my protocol, but I cannot get the watch to communicate (using my protocol) with the CC1111 USB dongle AP that came with the Chronos watch kit.

I tried the python code to read the accelerometer data from the watch (using the simpliciti protocol) and it works. From previous posts, I see that each accelerometer reading sent by the watch is 7 bytes. So I tried sending the same 7 bytes (i.e., a raw packet with just these 7 bytes), but the python code won't get anything from the COM port (i.e., from the USB AP). My guess is that the SimpliciTI protocol adds a preamble to the packet, and the RF AP only accepts data with that specific preamble.

So my questions are:

1. What will I need to communicate to PC using my own protocol? I think I would need to reprogram the CC1111 USB dongle so that it'll accept my protocol packets. Am I right?

2. From this post (http://e2e.ti.com/support/low_power_rf/f/155/t/31259.aspx) I understand that I can program the CC1111 USB dongle using CC debugger kit, but it might be better to just buy CC1111EMK868-915 Eval kit, and I am okay with buying CC1111EMK. But on that post, the question was regarding using CC1111EMK as a sniffer. So my question is:  can I program CC1111EMK to communicate with the watch using my protocol? Or are there low-level SimpliciTI protocol details (e.g., packet format, premables) that we cannot change?

Also, if you have any other suggestions on how to communicate between the watch and the PC using a different protocol (other than simpliciTI), I'll really appreciate that.

thanks,

Sam