Launch HN: Synnax (YC S24) – Unified hardware control and sensor data streaming

This is really neat, I know a lot of folks in manufacturing QA that would love something like this. The telemetry aspect of industrial equipment is terrible IMO, so many folks are hand rolling sensors and triggers and then trying to duct tape an extremely fragile monitoring and dashboard system using something like graphite. Neat space to be in!

How are you going to interface with the big boys like rockwell? I see you have drivers, what about partnerships? I know a lot of companies tend to only work with toolsets their provider "blesses", so having them on "your team" can help. You may have to pick favorites to win early deals/"synergy" (and may help with acquisition?)

I've worked with industrial automation in the past and have always enjoyed the technical constraints within it. I would be interested in helping you with pre or post-sales support/training/implementation for your customers if you need it. Email is in my profile.

I work for a YC company in the industrial maintenance space and we've been looking at integrating machine data drive and automate certain maintenance workflows. The most difficult aspects of integrating machine data have been (i) networking and (ii) translating whatever protocol (Ehternet/IP, Profinet, Modbus, etc.) the machine's control system uses into familiar formats. In many cases, PLCs aren't connected to a network, the customer doesn't know which tags point to the data they need, IT has concerns about security, and the list goes on. How are you guys thinking about these networking and protocol translation issues?

Second question. The main platform in this space is Ignition. Do you consider yourself a competitor to Ignition or are you aiming for a different use case?

Context: started a company that did essentially this about a decade ago. Haven’t looked back much. My data may be stale or just biased.

> We used old control software that spit out data in massive 10 GB CSV or TDMS files. After a long day and night of testing, no one wanted to go through all the work to review the data.

> We think Synnax is unique in that it provides a bridge between <lab/automation DAQ systems>

On the surface it seems like anomaly detection is still the hard problem, but you’re not setting out to solve it?

Time series databases are state of the art generally in finance, not in industrial/InfluxDB, so I don’t think saying you’re 5x influxSB on writes is going to persuade too many people, especially given the cost now for a terabyte of RAM. I’ll just move all of it to an in-memory database before I’ll take on the switching costs.

The thing I wanted was one solution for something that was always two: a properties/metadata database, and a separate time series database.

It seems to me like you are maybe building a level too low and could get a lot more value working on the problem that you say motivated you in the first place. It is hard because of all the context required to automatically detect anomalies, but I think that is why it is valuable to solve.

The value we had was we rolled in the data/cellular connection all the way down to the endpoint, so they could avoid IT integration, which was a big hurdle at the time. I don’t know if IT integration is still a hang up for your customers.

We found that visualization layers tended to reach down just far enough into the data intake world that it was really hard to sell just another tsdb.

Hey! I work at a startup that does industrial automation related work and this looks super helpful. Going to take a deeper look later, but off the bat I wanted to ask why you felt a custom time series database was warranted when there are options like timescale or regular old postgres out there?

How will this work with legacy systems? When I would go out to do site installations at concrete plants, the control systems were these antiquated systems cobbled together by CommandAlkon (the major player for the last 20 years). Would you replace that software? Often times these servos and sensors were deeply integrated into the vendor solution, so how could Synnax work in this environment, if at all?

Using vernacular from the industrial automation industry, how is this different from a historian?

A sensor is physically wired to an input on a PLC which collects data, the historian software communicates with the PLC/DCS and saves instrument/sensor data for further review.

Just curious, were you inspired by Asimov when naming the company?

https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Synnax

FYI your CSS looks to be broken on Firefox.

How does this compare with Zenoh?

Some related work that might be interesting:

https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~kotz/research/project/solar/

https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~kotz/cmc/projects/solar.html