Hi there, Gorjan,
Greetings from a fellow eco-activist (I moved from a silicon valley software consulting career to do environmental filmmaking and that led me towards extensive low-cost monitoring work). Thanks for your excellent work addressing air quality. I installed your app and decided to just dive right in and bought the Pro account so I could really test it out right away. So far it looks REALLY good! I’m impressed, and I’ve seen a lot! And I have lots of notes:
- Can you add PurpleAir VOC readings? I have started deploying VOC readings all over the place.
- Is it possible to add many other types of monitors into your app? For instance, can you include US EPA reference monitors in your readings?
- I looked at the last week near my house and found a day that was mostly yellow is listed as Green “18” for the day in the calendar view. It is listed as PA | Pittsburgh - Beechwood Boulevard US AQI. Because we have spikes in air pollution in the night and morning here (sometimes dramatic – often bringing us to “worst PM2.5 in the nation” status), I would love to be able to toggle between 24 hour average and “worst air of the day” and also maybe indicate what timeframe is actually averaged (like a 1 hour average interval to determine “worst” or even a 15 minute interval?)
- The app shows the last 72 hours graphically with the colored bar graph, and I really like that data format. That said, I’d love to be able to see a 7 day report – particularly if I flip my phone horizontally to view.
- I’d like to be able to set a “favorite pool” of monitors that are averaged to indicate when I will get an alert. That way I can track 3-4 local monitors to get a sense of the general trajectory, instead of just one (which might have some errors or other outage, etc.).
- I think your “activate” section has lots of potential. I like the idea of potentially finding other air monitor enthusiasts/community based on our mutual interest in a particular monitor. There is probably a whole lot more that can happen here.
- Can you add the US EPA correction to the settings screen in the main menu?
- I’ve started exploring the Apple Watch functionality. I’ll let you know when I have more feedback. My initial reaction is that I’m eager to have a complication that grabs the data from my favorite air monitor (or from my selected “pool” of air monitors). Right now it just appears that the complication is a simple link to open up the app. I’d also like the graph of the last 24 hours to show in the Watch view (perhaps swipe to it and then have it remember which screen I like to use?). Seems that the watch is slow with the “getting data” process. Could just be that my watch is old and slow. But it would be nice if this was quicker and/or data transfer was handled more in the background.
- It would be really helpful if you could scrape the name of the actual PurpleAir monitor that is listed in the favorites. I have lots very close to me (and several at my house) and it would help me keep track of them better if I could know their exact names.
- I couldn’t figure out how adjust the settings for the alerts. I would REALLY love to be able to set a level of PM2.5 at which I got a notification. This can be tricky because I don’t want to get a million notifications if it stays above the threshold. I have found that many people have different levels of tolerance of polluted air. I’d also like to be able to set alerts at multiple levels. (i.e. I don’t want to jog above 60AQI but I will want to tweet public alerts when it gets above 100AQI. And I really want to know if it goes above 150AQI because that’s just awful). I’d like to adjust the level by single AQI increments, so 63, 65, 114, 203 AQI, etc.). I’d like to set alerts for PM2.5 and VOC levels at a minimum. Eventually I’d like to have ozone alerts as well.
- Can you use the data to forecast what the monitor will show at my house 42 hours in advance? I think this is possible based on historical monitor data combined with weather forecast data provided at this page → Hourly Graphical Forecast for 40.29N 79.89W . I have found that the Wunderground app has a very simple but effective and powerful “Smart Forecast” that I have tuned to my needs, but it doesn’t specifically try to predict monitor levels at my house, and I don’t know how to make it leverage the detailed information at the NWS, but I would LOVE that information. Here is how I attempt to predict stench at my house in Pittsburgh: #Stinkburgh: Predicting Stench in Pittsburgh | INVERSION . I think that this domain is a perfect place to use some clever AI to look at a wide range of variables to make an excellent forecast. Even a “likely range” would be really great to have. When our air is bad here in Allegheny County/Greater Pittsburgh, it reeks of industrial odors like sulfur/rotten eggs, so there is a huge quality of life piece to being able to forecast when it will smell. Like rain, it can ruin an otherwise perfectly good outdoor event. Happy to discuss this more. (There is even a SmellPGH app with open data that tracks public complaints of air quality here: https://smellpgh.org/ .)
- It appears that your monitor regards the newly updated PurpleAir Plantower hardware as reporting “possibly wrong measurements.” I think that there is an extensive post about the differences here: New version of Plantower PMS5003 - #6 by Mark_from_Pittsburgh . I think that they are definitely different than the original PurpleAir hardware but to exclude them seems to be a bit of an extreme response. I would really like to be able to see them (and this will be a problem for your app as more and more people deploy these newer monitors with the new Plantower units).
I have given lots of quick suggestions here, but overall you’ve done a really nice job. It appears to be easy to use and stable on my iPhone Xs. Thank you for creating it, and I can’t wait to see future revisions!!
Always Monitoring,
Mark