(very newbie) "assembling" a message to be sent

Hi. You English is pretty good :+1:

Yeah, all possible, start reading up on nodejs buffer.

Buffer has swathes of functions for reading and writing bytes, words, floats, 32bit, signed / unsigned, BE, LE, and so on.

For things like bit shifts, masking etc look at the JavaScript Bitwise Operators

For creating a message to send your data payload, refer to node-red documentation working with messages

Try putting it all together in an easy example (make sure you make use of debug nodes and node.warn()). When you get stuck, come back and ask a question.