Ladybug Tools has announced new Dragonfly district thermal system simulation workflows, developed through several years of collaboration with teams at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, now the National Lab of the Rockies, around the URBANopt SDK. The new Dragonfly District Thermal components are aimed at feasibility studies for fourth- and fifth-generation district energy systems. ...
The Seed Eco-Home 2 is an ambitious project to be the world’s only open source house design to be offered as a product you can replicate, not only as a DIY, but as a commercial offering. The open source design features a 1,000sf house that you can build for only 50,000USD in just one week with a friend. The house is code compliant, modular construction for a incredibly short build time, with the ability to build in parallel with non-skilled workers who can put together pieces like Lego. The end goal? To help solve affordable housing, and to transition the built environment economy away from the proprietary and towards the collaborative. ...
For those who haven’t heard of Ladybug Tools before, it is an open source collection of free computer applications that support environmental design and education connecting 3D Computer-Aided Design (CAD) interfaces to a host of validated simulation engines. Although Ladybug Tools do ship platform agnostic libraries, it is currently primarily only usable with proprietary tools, but there is a project underway to make it available for Blender. ...
The VI-Suite user manual has been released and is now available on the documentation page on the website. The VI-Suite is an open-source add-on to the 3D modelling and animation package Blender. It provides a set of tools for the analysis of environmental factors within and around buildings. It uses Blender’s node system to provide a user interface that allows quick and custom analyses to be created. ...
Ladybug Tools has been working hard on creating a new cloud-based environmental simulation platform called Pollination. Pollination is unique compared to other cloud-based environmental simulation platforms in that it doesn’t operate as a black box, and instead operates as a high fidelity task runner for environmental analysis engines. The task descriptions are standardised as a set of nodes, each describing a single step in the analysis process. This is called a “recipe”. Together, these tasks allow environmental simulationists to scale their analysis easily whilst ensuring that the validity of their simulation is never sacrificed. ...