cea-grasshopper

A Rhino/Grasshopper interface to the City Energy Analyst (CEA) using honey-badger.

Introduction

The CEA uses a file (scripts.yml) to define the list of known scripts as well as their parameters. These scripts can be used with the cea SCRIPT [PARAMETERS] command to run the scripts that you would otherwise run via the GUI interface. In fact, that's how the GUI interface runs the scripts in the background!

honey-badger is a tool that takes a "badger-file" (a .json)as an input and produces a .ghpy file that can be placed in the Grasshopper "Libraries" folder.

The task of this repository, therefore, is:

• write a python script (using the CEA python environment) to create/update a badger-file

  • cea-compile-grasshopper.py

  • cea-grasshopper.json

• define how cea.config.Configuration.Parameter subclasses are to be mapped to Grasshopper parameters (suggestion: just use strings)

• write a python script (using the GhPython IronPython environment) to shell out to CEA Python (using subprocess.Popen or similar)

  • cea_runner.py for now

• Ideally, print progress to RhinoApp.WriteLine

• wrap all this stuff up and compile to cea-grasshopper.ghpy that can be deployed to the Grasshopper Libraries folder.

• stretch goal: publish this to Food4Rhino

Since Grasshopper uses GUIDs to denote components, the cea-compile-grasshopper.py will make sure to re-use GUIDs from previous runs. So the output of this script (cea-grasshopper.json, the badgerfile) needs to be updated if it already exists.