Solar potential for buildings

arjundesai · April 19, 2023, 8:05am

Hello, I an trying to write a program that generates building solar potential using ladybug tools. However I do not fully understand the documentation part. Can someone help me with creating the program?

charlie.brooker · April 19, 2023, 8:19am

Hey @arjundesai, can you provide some more detail?

arjundesai · April 20, 2023, 2:17pm

Sure.
I am trying to do a solar potential study for multiple buildings. Instead of using the visual programming in grasshopper, I need to do the same study at run time by writing a python script. I have seen tutorials of visual programming but when I am referring to the documentation of ladybug tools, I don’t find all the relevant functions there like function for creating grid, Cumulative Sky Matrix, Ladybug_Radiation Analysis, etc. Also there is not documentation available for ladybug_radiance.

charlie.brooker · April 20, 2023, 2:54pm

Hi @arjundesai, I think I’m with you - I guess you’ve seen this?

And the code for it here:

The simulation.py and input/output files look like they’d be useful to you:

github.com

pollination-apps/incident-radiation/blob/master/app/simulation.py

"""Run a ray tracing simulation with Radiance and compute incident radiation."""
import math
import streamlit as st

from ladybug.viewsphere import view_sphere
from ladybug_radiance.skymatrix import SkyMatrix
from ladybug_radiance.intersection import intersection_matrix


def compute_sky_matrix(
        sky_file_path, run_period, north, high_sky_density, ground_reflectance,
        avg_irr, use_benefit, bal_temp):
    """Compute the sky matrix from an input weather file and run period."""
    # create the sky matrix from the files
    hoys = None if len(run_period) == 8760 else run_period.hoys
    if sky_file_path.name.endswith('.epw'):
        if use_benefit:
            sky_matrix = SkyMatrix.from_epw_benefit(
                str(sky_file_path), bal_temp, 2, hoys,
                north, high_sky_density, ground_reflectance)

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It looks like the ladybug_radiance code can be found here:

arjundesai · April 20, 2023, 3:12pm

Yes, I saw the ladybug_radiance code. However, the API documentation is missing which would be very helpful

charlie.brooker · April 20, 2023, 3:17pm

Hey @chris, are you planning to host the ladybug_radiance documentation similarly to the other modules?

For now @arjundesai it looks like Chris has included most of the documentation in the code, just not hosted it in a pretty front end. You might be able to set up the sphinx documentation front end locally starting from here - not something I’m familiar with

chris · July 7, 2023, 7:12pm

Hi @charlie.brooker ,

Thanks so much for bringing this to my attention and I’m sorry t fell through the cracks a couple of months ago. You’re right that I did all of this work to have the documentation generated for ladybug-radiance and then I forgot to deploy it to a public domain. The docs are deployed now and you can find them here:

https://www.ladybug.tools/ladybug-radiance/docs/

I have also made sure that ladybug-radiance has been added to our page with all of the SDK docs:

https://discourse.ladybug.tools/pub/ladybug-tools-core-sdk-documentation