Export Rhino urban generator to CEA files

[jimenofonseca]

based on #662 it was found that in order to connect the urban generator to CEA for now. The best is to create databases readable by CEA.

These are all the input files contained in CEA/examples/open-case-study.zip/baseline/inputs>

• Zone.shp
• architecture.dbf
• occupancy.dbf
• age.dbf

[ShiZhongming]

@daren-thomas Hi Daren I have been able to build up the script to export CEA files in PyCharm. However, as you told me that the ghPython works differently... How did you manage to call libraries in ghPython? Thanks.

[ShiZhongming]

@daren-thomas an update here. I am able to install some libraries and some scripts work now. I am figuring out how to install numpy for IronPython..

[ShiZhongming]

@daren-thomas Please find the xlsx files in the recent commit for the generation of CEA files. Let me know if you think somewhere needs to be changed. Thanks~

[daren-thomas]

@shizhongming what must i do to run the current (your) version?

[daren-thomas]

@shizhongming I've started looking at this and trying some stuff out. I think we already have most of the primitives needed: The CEA has a script cea excel-to-dbf that could be used. We'd need only a few small changes:

• UBG Excel output should have the correct column names (currently all uppercase)
• add a script cea excel-to-shp that parses the coordinates (note for future me: use ast.literal_eval)
• for documentation purposes, a table of columns -> field_specs for each of these tables would be tres cool! If we keep this in machine readable format (e.g. a file in the databases section), then we could use that in these tools.

[daren-thomas]

we're closing this as this is basically the same as the epic (a sort of meta-issue)