Air Quality Checker

Checking air quality is important for me because my daughter is 3 years old and loves being outside. I grew up with asthma, and I wanted to be able to quickly see if it's safe to go outside.

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Inspiration

I grew up with asthma and my sister suffered from it for a long time. After living in China I know that air quality can be deleterious to health, both physically and mentally. Because my daughter is 3 years old, she loves to be outside but I wanted to make sure that it's safe to go outside.

What it does

It pulls data from the IQAir API database with search queries using city and state. It will return the temperature and Air Quality as well as the information about what the air quality number means.

How we built it

I used JavaScript, HTML, and CSS with the bulk of the work on the JavaScript end.

Challenges we ran into

  1. Some of the hardest things to do were to populate and append data to the webpage after retrieving the data. Although the code will work, I'm not sure if it is industry best practice.
  2. Loading the icons from Font Awesome would sometimes get snagged, and other times would have no problem. I'm still not sure why.
  3. CORS - I'll have to learn more about this and how to navigate around it in the future, but for now I'm happy that it works on my machine and with a CORS tester.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I didn't have that many problems and built the app relatively quickly. Also, this was the first time using this API and I didn't have any major problems.

What we learned

I'm currently learning about API usage and wanted to expand my knowlege.

What's next for Air Quality Checker

Adding more features and different search parameters. Currently, it can only search in the USA, but I would be happy to add international search and geolocation.

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