[Feature]: Consider switching #wardriving channel to PAYLOAD_TYPE_GRP_DATA

[cwichura]

Platform

MeshMapper Apps

What feature do you want?

MeshCore recently added a new channel message type, PAYLOAD_TYPE_GRP_DATA. This allows sending binary data instead of text. Consider requesting a data ID allocation for MeshMapper (see https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/blob/main/docs/number_allocations.md) and use this for the pings sent to the wardriving channel.

Why do you need it?

This could further reduce the size of the wardriving ping messages generated by MeshMapper.

How important is this?

Suggestion

Anything else?

This would do away with the option for people who still want to make their pings public, though. In my region, at least, nobody has enabled that -- everyone prefers the privacy of the new message encoded pings.

[cwichura]

I presume MeshMapper has a unique ID for every user. If it's already numeric, great. If not, add a unique numeric column on the backend for it. Then your binary data could be something like 4 bytes user ID, 4-8 bytes ping ID (I don't know what your base64-encoded ping ID currently requires). Doing that, you shorten the name of the user sending the message, you shorten the ping ID itself, and you also eliminate the need for the "MM:" static text, since the app ID would identify the group data as for MeshMapper. So should cut down on the size of the wardriving pings quite a bit. Especially for people with long companion device names.

[cwichura]

While this would require companion firmware v1.15+ to send the group data messages, as I understand it, the messages should propagate throughout the network even if repeaters are on older firmware. It's easy for people to update the firmware on their companion. Its repeaters that may be slow to update due to physical accessibility limitations/etc. I don't see making users update their companion version to be a concern. They should be updating already, anyway...