Nicheloom

Market intelligence for builders — see what's gaining traction before it's crowded.

BambooGrid

Open-source web UI for power grid modeling and power flow

Details

External ID
48936271
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
BambooGrid
Website domain
kickstage.com
Launched
July 16, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
37
Upvotes percentile
0.8112305854241338
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

Hi HN, I am co-founder of Kickstage, a software company specializing in solutions for the electrical industry and lately grid operators.We are hiring engineers from different backgrounds, a lot of them software developers with limited experience in the sectors. Deep domain knowledge is key in our industry however, so we are constantly teaching the basics of power flow analysis, active vs reactive power, transmission line properties etc.With Jupyter notebooks and the Python console only, that's a tedious task and hardly ever led to a deep understanding of the topics.So we built BambooGrid: a web-based editor on top of pandapower, a popular simulation library in our industry. You drag elements like buses, lines, loads generators and transformers onto a canvas, wire them up, set parameters and run power flow. It will print results directly on the canvas, color buses according to their voltages, even allows you to see an interactive admittance matrix.You can try it out without installing anything on https://bamboo.kickstage.com (thanks to our friends at Hostzero who sponsored hosting). Start with one of the included samples or draw your own. Just don't forget to add a slack element.Built on a Python backend (driven by the choice of pandapower mainly) and a React frontend. Fully MIT licensed, so feel free to use and modify to your liking. Even better: Give us feedback - we're extremely open to suggestions how to improve the tool and are glad about every user who learns a bit more about power systems through it.Šime, who built most of this, is also in the thread. We are both happy to answer anything about the implementation or power systems in general.

Enrichment

Theme
3D graphics and physics simulation tools
Vertical
Energy & climate
Function
Vertical SaaS
Audience
B2B
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
web ui for power grid modeling and power flow
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial Building the web-based node editor is straightforward, but accurately modeling electrical power grid components and load-flow simulation physics requires power systems engineering expertise.

What it would actually take: The architecture typically uses a React/TypeScript frontend (with React Flow or HTML5 Canvas for single-line diagrams) connected to a Python backend running Pandapower, PYPOWER, and NumPy/SciPy. The hard part is constructing accurate electrical admittance matrices, modeling transformer taps and reactive power limits, and ensuring solver convergence across complex meshed grid networks. This requires specialized electrical engineering domain knowledge.

Discussion

13 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: PyPSA (power systems analysis tool), Grid operator software

Concerns raised: Difficult for users without electrical engineering background to connect/use, Challenges syncing visual layer with data structures for Python shell integration, Sandboxing complexity for hosted version with interactive Python

Feature requests: Scale selector for kW and W scales (not just MW), Interactive Python shell integration, Blog post/documentation on power flow and admittance matrix algorithms

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 29 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #6 of 30 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 242 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a vertical saas tool for Insurance yet.