I can contribute 6 months - full time - contacts here for guidance?
Hello guys, I'm an environmental engineer doing a masters in energy engineering. I'm a big fan of FOSS and am interested in the building and planning sector, as its a big contributor to climate change and well being, and is heavily dominated by few proprietary licences. I have recently worked as a PV-installer and technician and also wondered why there is no free, open-source, vendor-independent software and which in the best case would be 1. Tied to a sort of modeling/BIM / GIS software 2. Easy to use for installers etc. I have thought about a kind of software that consists of you 1. modeling objects, with properties (thermal, electrical, acoustics etc.) 2. you construct whatever 3. and then make calculations/simulations based on geometry and properties. Pls forgive me here as I have no prior experience with BIM, software engineering and the whole landscape. As far as I understand a lot of things are implemented (e.g Ladybug tools, FreeCAD, Bonsai/IFCopenShell etc.) and its kind of exactly in the format I am imagining (IFC is objects with properties right?) and Bonsai is as far as I understand using Blender as a front end but is now already kind of standalone in the backend. Great! My question is the following: I need to do a master thesis for 6 months. Unpaid. I could contribute to this software for my thesis. I would especially be interested in something related to energy/ solar energy - I could do a module or looking more into the ladybug tool - bonsai intersection or whatever. I just need guidance to help with understanding If I can help, where most. Im not a software engineer, I just have undergrad programming courses done so I get the basics of datastructures & algorithms and so on and Im decent at python.
Comments
Please take a look to https://community.osarch.org/discussion/comment/18046#Comment_18046
Ifc to gbxml (and then I guess openstudio + energy plus) could be something interesting?
Cheers!
Sure. Maybe I worded it wrong / didnt at the end, But what I'm kind of looking for is someone "supervising" me. My University/professor will allow this probably but he needs some contact person and I also probably need someone to guide me a bit during the project. Still your comment is a help if I dive into it, thanks!
I wish you the best of luck BobMcBobby (related to Boaty McBoatFace?) and I don't want to be a Debbie Downer, but it might be tough to find someone with free time, enough knowledge in that particular area, and in the right time zone to provide timely guidance. What TZ are you in? This might automatically rule some people out, because instead of a quick IM chat, you're dealing with slow e-mail round-trips due to TZ differences.
100% Understand your point - I'm also kind of lost on how to approach this and who to contact (here or at University). I'm in central Europe.
So the two big core maintainers are @Moult (Dion, who's AU or NZ) and @aothms (Thomas, I think in EU). But they tend to be busy with a lot of stuff, and I'm not even sure they would consider themselves the best person, based on the what I've seen Dion in particular say about other people's work on energy related integrations and tools into Bonsai (of the kind "Wow! That's cool! I really need some free time to learn more about that aspect."). What they might have to hand is the names of those who might be able to mentor you (assuming they accept the responsibility) who've got good knowledge in what you want to work on.
Ideally you could find someone in Europe using these energy related tools professionally who could give you a grounding in what is there, what needs improvement. Don't be shy, search the forums for threads covering this field, and look for users who are discussing using these tools, and try and approach them for mentorship. Together you could then develop a realistic plan for what you want to achieve in the six months you have, that also meets the needs of your professor/uni/thesis.
When does the 6 months start?
@brunopostle has done really nice tools like ifc to gbxml.
Cheers!
Thanks I will do that. Also I will contact a group at my local Uni as I've seen that they use Ladybug tools a lot.
Ideally, I start in September.
I think @Cyril might be the person you are looking for.
If you'd like to hack on Bonsai, @Cyril can probably help guide you on which aspects to help build.
Alternatively, if you'd like to resurrect Ladybug Tools for Blender, which is currently incomplete, I can give you a heads up, and probably isn't a huge amount of work with AI's help nowadays.