psi.sg

Haze season is here in Singapore. This year it got pretty bad as the weather recently had been hot and dry, leading to more fire hotspots in neighbouring Indonesia, which then gets blown over by the wind. The worst we’ve ever experience was around ten years ago when the haze got so bad that we had to stay indoors and wear N95 masks when out and about.

But checking the air quality indexes every day always felt off. It shows a number which on it’s own, is devoid of context and meaning. Like, what does a PM2.5 reading of “15µg/m3” even mean? When I see “PSI 57 - Moderate”, how does it affect me? What should I do, or avoid doing? How do I use the 2 different numbers? I often had to cross-compare with the legend, the health advisories. It feels like there can be a slightly better user experience to it.

Chancing upon the public API on the air quality index provided by the government gave me an idea: I could build a UI wrapper around it, to solve my own problem.

I went and bought the psi.sg domain, and started building.

Just a simple tech stack – Vue.js, plain CSS. Fetch the json data from the public APIs. Overlay with health advisory information and actions to take. Bonus features includes geolocation to detect your region to give you a more accurate reading, and localStorage to save your settings on preferred region and index metric.

Trying to get this launched within a few days!

Watch this space.