It turned out to be quite a task due to the inability to transfer multiple types of data in one wire from one grasshopper component to another. The only fault we could see (and it’s only a matter of time before DIVA develops it further) was the inability to model more than one zone so we decided to tackle that with Gerilla. It was a bit disappointing (we actually thought we might be the first to the scene), but we couldn’t deny Viper’s impressive usability and interface.
#Ecotect grasshopper software#
After our midterm project we discovered DIVA (a software group out of Harvard GSD) had developed their own Grasshopper to EnergyPlus plug-in called Viper. My major contribution to the project was to develop the ability for Gerilla to model multiple thermal zones. It would be really awesome to hook this tool up to Galapagos or some other evolutionary solver or optimizer (I just tried to run Gerilla with Galapagos and it set approximately 400 EnergyPlus simulations into motion for a second I thought I sentenced my computer to an eternity of command windows). With some more development it could be a useful tool to iterate and determine ideal massing, orientation, wall and window u-values, window to wall ratios and shading. It’s a pretty convincing proof of concept for a grasshopper energy modeling plug in that could be incredibly useful for a designer in the schematic design phase to iterate their designs. I think Gerilla is a very successful project considering our skills at the outset of the course.
But the rollercoaster ride of failure and eventual (sometimes) success was a thrill that kept me going for hours on end. You can check out a Gerilla demo video at the bottom of this post. I had to set aside whole days to battle very simple tasks that an actual computer programmer could accomplish in their sleep. It was part programming, part user interface design, part sustainable design and energy modeling and a whole lot of cursing under my breath. We took our initial grasshopper definition made of custom vb nodes and developed them into full-fledged custom Grasshopper components (Jonatan Schumacher's tutorial on building VB.net Grasshopper components in Visual Studio). For the final project, my team members, Drew and Mike, and I further developed the Grasshopper to EnergyPlus tool and even came up with an animal name for it: Gerilla. I wrote about the earlier stages of the Interoperability course and wrote about my midterm project connecting grasshopper and EnergyPlus. Well, thanks to a well-designed and taught course by Jonatan Schumacher and Ben Howes, both PAE alumni and members of the advanced computational modeling team at Thornton Thomasetti, I have not only gotten a grip of object oriented programming but I have developed pseudo software and having wrestled with the inner workings of grasshopper, rhinocommons and EnergyPlus, I feel incredibly more confident as a grasshopper user and I have a much better understanding of Energy Modeling concepts. I was happy playing in grasshopper and learning about sustainable design, why confuse my mind with computer science? Even in my first year at PAE, when I heard about the Interoperability/OOP course that the second year students were taking I had no interest in taking the course I didn’t see the purpose. Objected oriented programming is a powerful tool, but if I have no direct use for the tool I typically have no motivation to try and pick it up.
However, I think I know understand that the biggest factor was motivation. Part of it might have been the ‘grammar’ of a programming language that I did not care to learn (I hated English grammar courses, why would I enjoy a Java grammar course). Even though I have always enjoyed math and logic courses, programming never clicked for me. I have never been much a fan of programming.