🎯 Objective

Introduce py-dss-toolkit through a tutorial series by Paulo Radatz, demonstrating how to use it with py-dss-interface and OpenDSS to access model data, run simulations, and visualize results.

🧠 Key Concepts

• py-dss-toolkit

• py-dss-interface

• OpenDSS model access

• Snapshot and QSTS simulations

• Visualization and result analysis

📜 Transcript Summary

Paulo Radatz presents an overview of a planned 12–14 video tutorial series that teaches py-dss-toolkit, a Python package built on top of py-dss-interface to simplify working with OpenDSS. The series will cover repository examples, accessing model data (lines, transformers, element counts), running snapshot simulations and quasi-static time series (QSTS) simulations, extracting and checking results (voltages, powers, violations), and visualization such as voltage profiles and circuit topology plots. Videos will be released roughly weekly and the presenter invites feedback, suggestions, and subscriptions. Website: pauloradatz.me

Topics: distribution systems, OpenDSS, and Python

💬 Suggested LLM Prompts

• How do I install py-dss-toolkit and py-dss-interface and set up OpenDSS to run the tutorial examples?

• What is the simplest py-dss-toolkit workflow to load a circuit, list lines and transformers, and count elements programmatically?

• How can I run a QSTS simulation with py-dss-toolkit and automatically detect voltage violations and produce a voltage profile plot?

📖 Table of Contents

• Introduction (py-dss-toolkit overview)

• Tutorial schedule and goals

• Repository and example scripts

• Accessing OpenDSS model data

• Snapshot simulations and results

• Quasi-static time series (QSTS) simulations

• Visualization and plotting

• Wrap-up, feedback, and next steps

📚 Glossary

• OpenDSS: An open-source electrical distribution system simulator used for modeling and analyzing distribution networks.

• py-dss-toolkit: A Python package that provides high-level utilities to control OpenDSS and simplify model access, simulation execution, and result processing.

• py-dss-interface: A lower-level package that connects Python to OpenDSS and serves as the dependency upon which py-dss-toolkit is built.

• Snapshot simulation: A single-time-step simulation in OpenDSS that evaluates network conditions at one moment to obtain voltages, currents, and powers.

• Quasi-static time series (QSTS): A sequence of steady-state simulations performed over successive time steps to represent system behavior over time.

🐍 Python Code Examples

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
# @Author  : Paulo Radatz
# @Email   : paulo.radatz@gmail.com

import py_dss_interface

import py_dss_toolkit

🕒 Full Transcript

Introduction (00:00:00)

Hi everyone, this is Paulo Radatz and today we are starting a new tutorial in my channel. It's going to be about py-dss-toolkit. This is a Python package that is meant to provide you at best capabilities to control OpenDSS.

Relation to py-dss-interface (00:00:16)

This package is not meant to replace the py-dss-interface. That is another package that connects to OpenDSS. The py-dss-toolkit depends on py-dss-interface, but provides you a bunch of functionalities that make it very easy to use OpenDSS. I would say that these two can definitely transform the way you are using OpenDSS.

Tutorial format and subscription (00:00:46)

So before I talk about the tutorial, the way we're gonna do it, what we're gonna have on the tutorial, I just want to ask you guys to subscribe to my channel. Just 40% of you are subscribed. So if you can subscribe, that would be great. I would appreciate it. Thanks so much.

Schedule (00:01:07)

Now regarding the tutorial, I'm planning to do maybe 12 or 14 videos, right? And then I'll be releasing every single week, probably on Saturdays. So again subscribe to my channel so you can follow that.

Goal and repository (00:01:20)

Now the goal here is to cover py-dss-toolkit. If I go here in my GitHub, you're gonna see the repository and here we have some examples and in here I have DSS tools, which are the folder that we have, you know, the content that I'll be covering, but I'll be creating my own scripts and sharing with you later.

What we'll cover (00:01:45)

But here pretty much you're gonna talk about how access model data, right? We load OpenDSS, how we can get the lines, the information of transformers, how we can get the number of elements we have. So this is more towards the model itself. We're also going to talk about snapshot simulation and get results, right? I'm gonna easy get results from a snapshot simulation, check if there are violations, check the voltage, the powers and we're gonna also later do for QSTS, quasi-static time series simulations and then we're gonna see how this package can help you with just one line of code. And then finally we go we're gonna cover a few visualization capabilities, plotting the voltage profile, plotting the circuit topology, right, with some results.

Schedule recap and closing (00:02:44)

So that's the idea again, around 12-14 videos once a week. And that's gonna be what we're gonna be covering, py-dss-toolkit, and I hope you enjoy it. If you have any suggestion, anything you want to hear more about it, please just send me a message or put that in this comment section below. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel, leave the thumbs up and I'll see you in the next video.