Efficient way to store and search through large data set?

This is what I realized tonight. I don’t need to get the list frequently. I can get the data once and parse it into a Google spreadsheet or even a list in the app. Or even sort it. And then each time I want to search for the closest sensor, I can just quickly look through the parsed data without getting all 19,000 records every time the screen refreshes.

This is kinda cool but it doesn’t work with data sets as large as mine:

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The problem is that blocks don’t work with this amount of data and you can’t even save it to the stored variable to speed up reuse.

I think I’m in business! I tried a bunch of JSON to CSV converters online and most can’t handle large data sets. But this one can:

https://www.convertcsv.com/json-to-csv.htm

I entered the API url for the entire sensor data set and downloaded the converter csv file. I opened that csv file in Google Sheets and it’s all there! 20,000 rows. Phew.

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@actech The new PurpleAir API (https://api.purpleair.com) has a lat/lon bounding box as part of the API call. And you can retrieve selected fields only rather than the entire dataset. This is gonna make my location search SO much faster. Woo hoo!

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