Outstanding explanation!
In order to keep only the first 28 bytes would you recommend looking at the packet number a la the example
http://docs.spark.io/webhooks/#handling-web-responses
or should I stream the response and drop off anything after the first three using something like strtok like described here?
or is there an easier way of just counting bytes as they pass through the buffer and copying the first 28 to a char array or string? Or am I misunderstanding.