Simulating Power Systems in Minetest

ElectriCraft will simulate power station control to help students learn power systems. This will be done by allowing students to create DC, AC, and three phase circuits with accompanying objects. Objects that ElectriCraft will support are digital multi-meter (which may also measures current but can also measure resistance and voltage), generators, wires, and lights. Wires will allow electricity to travel (from generators to lights). Lights will use that energy to and light up. Generators will be the source of electricity and will be configurable by the students (an in-game graphical user interface (GUI) will be present to adjust current, voltage, and power). =Problem Definition= Currently, there is a distinct lack of learning programs and tools available to students of all ages to learn about electricity. Most programs available are geared toward high school to college level students, and are rather bland in presentation. This leaves a gap for an all age range learning tool that gamifies the learning paradigm to increase user retention.

Background
Minetest is a free and open source voxel game. A voxel video game is a game that has a 3d world that consists of ​voxels​. It was chosen as it has extensive support for creating modifications, mods, to the game. It’s straightforward to write mods that modify game behavior and add new elements to the game. Such as power systems, measurements tools, generators, etc... There exists a broad modding community to Minetest, ensuring that problems faced during the development of ElectriCraft may be solved by either reaching out to members of the community to ask questions or by finding reference material online to aid in the development and testing of Minetest.

Deliverables
Our objective is to develop a video game modification to assist future students in learning and experimenting with power systems, DC circuits, AC circuits, and three phase circuits - all with accompanying tools and objects for the circuits to interact with.

Generators


 * AC
 * DC
 * Three Phase

Tools
 * Multi-meter

Objects
 * Wires
 * Lights

=Value Proposition Statement= ElectriCraft’s goal will be to aid students in creating and learning power systems. This will be accomplished by providing facilities in-game to create several different types of circuits. DC circuits, AC circuits,and three phase circuits. Students will be exposed to the concepts of electricity and circuits at an earlier age than was previously possible. This will increase interest in the STEM field through the use of game elements to portray the real world mechanics of electricity.

=Design Considerations=


 * The ElectriCraft mod will run on all platforms supported by Minetest.
 * This includes both 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows 7, windows 10, macOS, various GNU/Linux distributions, and FreeBSD.
 * The installation of ElectriCraft will not differ from Minetest’s supported mod installation process.
 * The Mod will use an industry standard electricity electric power Distribution System Simulator such as Python DSS or OpenDSS.
 * The mod should range from simple to complex to support all ages for learning electrical circuits.

Other considerations include ensuring the codebase is extendable and modular, so that future work on this project can be done quickly and easily.

=Project Learning=
 * Understanding Power generation from AC, DC, and three phase generators
 * Create a web framework using flask to communicate between
 * Create a communication link between the LUA running scripts and the Python running server.

=Final Design=

=Validation= Validation is done through OpenDSS, as it is vetted and industry standard simulation tool. If the circuit is considered connected, then the values are assumed to be correct as they are pulled directly from the OpenDSS API from the most recent simulation.

=Team Members=

=Additional Documentation= Github: Link