matthijskooijman
commented
5 years ago We have been working on this for a while now. A first (very, very rough) prototype of the backend is available at https://github.com/meetjestad/mjs_backend_design/tree/backend-prototype with the corresponding Arduino code at https://github.com/meetjestad/mjs_backend_design/tree/arduino-new-protocol. Documentation is still sparse (the README in the arduino code branch is not updated at all) and the design is still very much in flux, but I wanted to share the status now already.
Currently, the radio packet format is fixed, and must be exactly matched on the server side. Adding extra data fields, or modifying something else is cumbersome and requires a lot of changes in the entire stack. Ideally, the node could (to some degree) declare its own packet format, put multiple measurements in one packet (related to #1), not send its GPS position in every packet, do some more compression of data (values relative to the previous value?), etc.
There is some work ongoing on defining a more flexible packet format, and server stack that allows such things. See also https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/forum/t/flexible-backend-system-for-processing-sensor-data/ or contact me if you're interested in this.