This primer provides an overview of the Dragonfly components for Grasshopper.
The Dragonfly plugin supports the creation of models following the dragonfly-schema, which is an abstracted means of describing building geometry built on top of the honeybee-grasshopper plugin. By using a fundamentally 2D representation of Building geometry, where all rooms are assumed to be extrusions of floor plates, Dragonfly makes it easier to build models of large buildings all of the way up to the scale of urban districts. All Dragonfly models are translatable to Honeybee models and so all Dragonfly models can be simulated in the same engines as Honeybee, including EnergyPlus/OpenStudio and Radiance.
However, Dragonfly makes it easier to create these simulation models from common 2D formats like GeoJSON. It also enables the connection to a wider array of simulation engines including:
URBANopt core SDK for modeling of district thermal systems
DiTTo / OpenDSS for sizing transformers and electrical infrastructure
REopt Lite for life cycle cost optimization of photovoltaics
Urban Weather Generator for estimation of urban heat island effects
See the Wiki of the lbt-grasshopper repository for the installation instructions for the entire Ladybug Tools Grasshopper plugin (including dragonfly-grasshopper).
Post your questions to Ladybug Tools forum and see the dragonfly-grasshopper repository for source code.
Please let us know if you find any mistakes in grammar or spelling in this primer and we will gladly fix them.