I’m trying to create a trash pickup schedule app for NYC (and a few other geos). The API for trash schedule takes a street address rather than a lat/long or place id. I was hoping that I would be able to use the “description” field in the location object as the street address, because I don’t want to do reverse geo coding, as that’s expensive. But I noticed the pixlet serve display doesn’t allow you to specify description, so I wasn’t sure if I could count on the description being the street address?
I don’t have a Tidbyt yet (they’re out of stock) so I can’t test this on a physical device.
Is reverse geocoding my only option? Or would the street address be provided in “description” if the user selects it?
Your app doesn’t get the description and place_id fields that are mentioned on the documentation. I think this might be on purpose to protect the user’s private information.
Anyway, you would need to reverse geocode. I found this list of APIs and and most of them have a free tier that will allow a few thousand requests each month : The Best Free Geocoding APIs Available: Ultimate List. Since the information won’t change, you could use Tidbyt’s cache function to store that for a very long period of time and save up on those requests.
Another option is to ask for the API key of a given service in the app’s Schema. This is less friendly as each user needs to go there and subscribe for their own key (not everyone is tech savvy enough for that), but you don’t need to be concerned about reaching the limit of a single global key.
This seems like overkill. Doesn’t everyone already know their trash pickup schedule? Just let them select the days to show the animation or whatever. Or you could ask them to input their street name.
I actually mimic this app by displaying an animated GIF of a trash truck on Thursday evenings to remind me that trash day is Friday
Oh man, this is a much easier idea lol. I initially planned to use an API since I wanted to add in trash holidays, but just asking the user is cheaper and easier.
