Modbus-style generic variables for use in custom modules

[EternityForest]

A lot of projects involve one-off data objects not covered by the existing telemetry features. For some projects it would be useful to have some more generic way of reading and writing from a device.

You could have a new packet type that just had a set of values and addresses, plus a version byte to let clients know if the layout has changed(And for the device to ignore packets with the wrong layout).

This could be used for things like PID loop controls, event timestamps, unusual config options like default brightness at boot, sprinkler valve cron expressions, lists of trouble codes, etc.

The scale, range, name, etc of these could be stored in a device description file, and the device itself could advertise some kind of identifier, that could be used to look up the description file in a git repo(There could be an official one, plus whatever user configured ones people add).

It's not 100% ideal compared to optimized dedicated data structures, but being able to build custom modules that the app can interact with, configure, and log data from, would be pretty amazing.

My experience has been that 80% of IoT-type stuff can be done with just strings, numbers, and various metadata options attached to them, so I would imagine people could build a lot of really cool stuff.