Passthrough (binary) data

[tkurki]

There are valid cases where we would want to be able to transmit data from a source connected to a Signal K gateway/server to the clients in uninterpreted format.

These include

• XDR NMEA0183 sentences not understood by the server
• proprietary N2K sentences
• binary data, such as image data

[tkurki]

Something like this for n2k?

{
    "context": "...",
    "updates": [{
        "source": {
            "type": "NMEA2000",
            "pgn": "130919",
            "src": 
            "label": "n2k-1",
        },
        "timestamp": "2016-09-06T19:52:44.000Z",
        "data": {
          "encoding" : "hex",
          "value" :   "3b,9f,03,02,04,5a,a1,12,19,09,09"
        }
    }]
}

[jboynes]

Base64 is a very common encoding used for binary data in JSON and more efficient than the simple hex format above.

Do we need to allow options for how binary is encoded?

[tkurki]

+1 on Base64. I thought that the encoding would be simple way to stay future proof, even with one specified encoding.