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.
- Wirespan, a daily power grid optimization puzzle I made for my son · hn · 2026-08-25 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- SolarStorm · hn · 2025-12-10 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- WebGCM · hn · 2026-09-21 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- A WebGPU-based browser engine with "Blam "-style physics · hn · 2026-01-15 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- NODI Energy - Distributed Energy Infrastructure to Rewire the Grid · yc · 2026-08-14 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- gridwatch-ai · github · 2026-09-29 · 20 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Tailgrids 3.0 · ph · 2026-05-10 · 339 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- xianyu-guanjia · github · 2026-09-16 · 22 upvotes · similarity 0.36
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a vertical saas tool for Insurance yet.