Raspberry Pi Gateway with RFM69W on GPIO port

[darkcurrent]

Hi,

I'm wondering why a usual gateway configuration is to hook a USB Moteino to the RPi USB port. I recently bought a RFM69W from LowPowerLab that I intented to connect directly to the GPIO port, using RFM69 library for the Raspberry to communicate with the Moteino nodes.
Could someone compare both solutions in terms of advantages/drawbacks/difficulty?

Thanks a lot.

[Felix]

It's cheap+overhead versus almost cheap and convenient/hassle free.
Having the RFM69 on the Rpi means keeping your Pi busy with handling the packets etc. Having it on a separate board means that board handles everything and you can talk serial to it in plain ASCII messages.