We are excited to announce that Binary Parser, a feature for Soracom Air devices that converts binary data into JSON, now supports MessagePack (hereafter MsgPack).

In many applications, a device may be configured to send data to a server or to the cloud using JSON format, often for compatibility with cloud services or simply to make the data easier to work with. However, sending data using JSON results in relatively high data usage due to JSON syntax requirements. MsgPack is a binary serialization format which allows a device to easily compress JSON data before it is sent, effectively reducing data usage.

Once data has been compressed and sent, it needs to be converted back to its original format so that a server or cloud service can understand it. With this update, you can now configure Binary Parser to convert MsgPack-compressed data back to JSON by simply entering @msgpack in the Binary Parser format setting. From there, the original JSON data can be sent to Soracom Harvest for storage and data visualization, or to Soracom Beam, Funnel, or Funk in order to forward the data to a server or a cloud service.

Since Binary Parser's conversion occurs after the data arrives at Soracom, cellular data usage can be reduced considerably.

Note: In order for Binary Parser to convert data, your device must be configured to send data to Unified Endpoint unified.soracom.io, or to the corresponding endpoint for Soracom Beam, Funnel, Funk, or Harvest. Data that is sent directly to a server or a cloud service will not be modified by Binary Parser.

MsgPack is available in more than 50 programming languages across many libraries, making it easy to implement in a wide variety of devices. For more information, refer to the official MessagePack site.

Custom Binary Parser formats can still be defined for bit-by-bit data conversion.