feature request: Import nodes from JSON or directly via MQTT

[freddyb]

Hi,

first of all, thank you for building the site planner. Really neat.

So far, I have been looking at promising node locations based on the mesh that already exists in my city (which has a lot of nodes). Planning point-to-point connections with the tools is really easy as I can just enter a sender and receiver and go with it.

However, it would be nice to get a better visualization of the whole mesh and I was wondering if it would be possible to import multiple nodes in bulk. I could see myself pulling things out of a network map in a specific JSON format, but end-to-end it would be best if those could be directly pulled from mqtt (I realize this is quite a lift).

I have never worked with vite or typescript, but am very familiar with the wider web tech ecosystem.

I'd be comfortable trying to contribute the JSON part of my idea if I would receive some pointers how this would be best achieved architecturally. I would likely need help with the visual components (form layout, UX etc) though.

[mrpatrick1991]

Good idea. Should fit well with the point-to-point mode feature request.

I need help figuring out how to get vector data from the SPLAT! backend in its native point to point mode. My reading of it is that right now it only generates an image and a text report, not the vector data we would need.

We could bring in another dependency (py-itm or similar) and use that for the point to point calculations, which are fine to do in python since it's a fairly inexpensive thing computationally. The only blocker there is reading the terrain tiles manually to extract the profiles between the points, but this is definitely do-able.

If you want to pull this down and try to get the broad strokes of this feature request in, I'm happy to work with you to complete them.