Lab Notes: Setting up air quality notifications with Purple Air, Sanity, Vercel, and Twilio
Written by Even Westvang
Haha. So guess where we live:
Yes, in the Bay Area - out there on the left coast, by the red circles. In the COVID-19 pandemic in the mega-fire. And we’d set our eldest daughter up to hang out with her friends under some parasols on their Chromebooks. Just to see other kids and to pretend things are normal.
But we keep needing to cancel. Because there’s a mega-fire. In a global pandemic. We keep laughing about this. With a slightly hysterical edge, "Haha, the pandemic mega-fire, haha."
So we spend a lot of time looking at air quality indications – Purple Air specifically. Purple Air is a crowdsourced network that uses cheap sensors to measure particulates. And on Friday SO said she would like a text when it looks like the fires might force us all to stay in.
I can't do much about the fire or the pandemic, but this I can actually address over the weekend.
Deciding on a setup
So how does one build such a thing? What's the absolute easiest way? I don't write a lot of code these days. To give you an idea, this is me last night trying to remember how to get array length in JavaScript:
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