Suggestions for IronBug development

Hi LadyBug and IronBug tools,
@MingboPeng @chris @mostapha

Thank you for your exceptional work and the remarkable dedication of your team to developing the LadyBug/IronBug Tools suite. Your contributions are invaluable to the community.

I would like to share two suggestions that I believe could further enhance the functionality and usability of your tools:

1- Would it be feasible to develop an engine that accepts OSM and IDF models from users and automatically configures LadyBug Tools workflows and detailed HVAC systems in IronBug? This feature could significantly streamline the integration of ideas from OpenStudio and EnergyPlus example repositories (e.g., GitHub). It would enable extensive brainstorming and experimentation by facilitating seamless formulation and testing of various systems and concepts.

2- When working on a laptop with a smaller screen, locating the correct IronBug components can be challenging due to the number of items in the toolbar. While the icons you’ve designed are visually impressive and intuitively represent their functions, their accessibility becomes limited in screen-constrained setups. For example, within the 02:LoopComponents category, only a portion of the items is visible. Would it be possible to implement scroll bars or a similar feature to allow users to hover and scroll through the components? This enhancement would greatly improve usability on smaller screens.

Thank you again for your time, assistance, and continued support.

Sincerely,
Behnam

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Thank you @behnammmohseni for your kind words and suggestions.

1- Would it be feasible to develop an engine that accepts OSM and IDF models from users and automatically configures LadyBug Tools workflows and detailed HVAC systems in IronBug? This feature could significantly streamline the integration of ideas from OpenStudio and EnergyPlus example repositories (e.g., GitHub). It would enable extensive brainstorming and experimentation by facilitating seamless formulation and testing of various systems and concepts.

In Honeybee, we have a LoadModel component that could load a OSM/IDF file as a HoneybeeModel, but this is only limited to the geometry part. The HVAC part would be hard to be kept or translate into any Ironbug workflow. This mainly because of the complicity of the HVAC system. But what we could help is if you have a certain type of HVAC systems you want to build with Ironbug, we can help you to recreate it manully based on your sample OSM/IDF model. But there is no automated way to do this.

2- When working on a laptop with a smaller screen, locating the correct IronBug components can be challenging due to the number of items in the toolbar. While the icons you’ve designed are visually impressive and intuitively represent their functions, their accessibility becomes limited in screen-constrained setups. For example, within the 02:LoopComponents category, only a portion of the items is visible. Would it be possible to implement scroll bars or a similar feature to allow users to hover and scroll through the components? This enhancement would greatly improve usability on smaller screens.

This is a great suggestion. But this part of UI is out of our control. This comes from the Grasshopper itself. I would suggest you to post this feature request to McNeel’s discourse: McNeel Forum so that their developer could help with this.

In term of a better way to locate the compoent without looking through the list of items in the toolbar. You can double-click the Grasshopper document and type any keyword about the compoent. This is what I usually do.

Hope I answer your questions.
Best,
Mingbo

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