
Show HN: Marple – Visualising millions of datapoints for engineers - NeroVanbierv
https://getmarple.io/
======
NeroVanbierv
Hi HN, co-founder here! We designed Marple for engineers to make visual
analysis intuitive and powerful. Most of our users are control systems
engineers or test engineers (but not the kind that tests software). They often
have to draw conclusions from millions of time series data points. As a quick
example: logging data from a drone control system for 15 minutes at 1.5 kHz is
already more than 1 million samples.

This creates some interesting technical challenges. We implemented a custom
visualisation engine that efficiently displays only the data that fits the
screen. In the same way, we also support applying functions such as low-pass
filters, integrals, derivatives, etc.

Having a visual approach to analysing data is in our opinion still highly
underrated. Common engineering tools such as Matlab or python+matplotlib
scripts require you to reduce the number of samples yourself. And you end up
with a plot that is not interactive: zooming, panning highlighting, adding a
different signal are all cumbersome or impossible. Marple treats interactivity
as a first class citizen.

We recently launched a beta version and we're currently looking for test users
to try it out. If you sometimes need to visualise some data from a .csv file,
python script, matlab script, simulation, ... you should give it a spin!

Cheers! Nero

~~~
blazespin
Some questions:

\- Is there druid integration? Is this a replacement for druid? \- How does
schema inference work? \- Can I do SQL queries? \- How is this better than
superset?

~~~
NeroVanbierv
There is no integration for any db setup at the moment, but this is one of the
next things we will tackle for sure! Druid was not on our radar, seems like it
is used a lot in automotive/aerospace. Never tested superset, I'll give it a
try. But it looks to be more like a dashboarding tool. Our goal is to provide
an investigative tool that allows the user to detect problems and in a very
interactive way change the visualisation.

~~~
blazespin
I downloaded and looked at it. Very cool. Superset has the broad alchemy
integration, which is pretty nice.

Integrating into a larger enterprise data dictionary would be nice. Eg, amazon
glue

This is really a big data visualization tool. There's a whole gigantic rich
market there to capture. You seem to be looking at it from the perspective of
csv files, which is a fresh take, I guess.

It's also unfortunately a very competitive space being worked on by folks with
insanely deep pockets and hyper smart engineers:
[https://www.newgenapps.com/blog/10-big-data-visualization-
to...](https://www.newgenapps.com/blog/10-big-data-visualization-tools/)

Still, a lot of what's out there is ungainly bloat ware meant for business
logic data. If you target specific engineering/science verticals with clear
use cases, it would compete.

~~~
MBaert
(other co-founder) Thanks a lot! Great to hear these positive reactions. You
make some very valid points. We are indeed trying to focus on a certain use
case, which we encountered our self in the past.

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lordlic
How much does this actually cost? I don't see pricing anywhere on the site. I
assume that info comes with the trial email but TBH I don't want to waste my
time with the trial if it's going to be out of my price range.

~~~
MBaert
This is a beta version, the goal of the trial is to gather feedback and find
interested parties. Pricing and pricing model is not set in stone yet and will
depend on what we see is feasible. Feel free to contact us in private to
discuss more in detail! :)

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wlll
Well that's just odd because I happen to live in Marple the town
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marple,_Greater_Manchester](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marple,_Greater_Manchester)

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generatorguy
Looks amazing! I’ve been using KST for years [https://kst-
plot.kde.org/](https://kst-plot.kde.org/) for interactive plotting but marple
looks to have some features kst does not

~~~
MBaert
(other co-founder) Cool! Let us know how you like it compared to KST :) We
focused a bit more on UX and interactiveness

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yingw787
Ooooooh interesting! Does it integrate with streaming or realtime services /
db solutions? What's the max load you've tried out so far? Would you offer on-
prem like Metabase?

~~~
NeroVanbierv
Realtime and db are among the things that we will work on next. We still need
to figure at a way to do this efficiently for us so that we don't need to
integrate ourselves with every kind of db. The maximum was about 400 million
datapoints in one visualisation, and that worked fine! We're also definitely
considering a Metabase/Grafana approach where you can deploy it yourself.

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bbuneci123
Hello. Nice product, but some small problems:

\- on MacBook 13", when editing calculated signals the dialog is bigger than
the screen and the dialog cannot be closed (and maybe some other parts of the
interface are hidden) - maybe add a max width/height on the dialog and a
scroll

\- the license does not work on windows (but works on mac build)

\- on mac the feedback button the application splits in 2 identical views,
with the mouse cursor movements mirrored (and an error about creating a folder
.../bugs)

~~~
NeroVanbierv
Sorry for the huge delay, I missed your comment. Thanks for the feedback! \-
just to confirm: this means your screen is has a height < 800px? \- do you
remember what exactly went wrong on windows? \- sounds very weird behaviour,
do you have a screenshot?

Thanks!

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facontidavide
I guess I will take the opportunity to congratulate Marple and say (self
promotion), that you have an open source alternative, that is equally able to
deal with gigabytes of data and millions of points.

[https://github.com/facontidavide/PlotJuggler](https://github.com/facontidavide/PlotJuggler)

------
snickmy
It looks likes this is a chromium/proton wrapper around a webapp. Is that
correct? The plot lib used seems very similar to plotly.

I'd be very curious to hear about some of the tech stack design choices. I'd
be also interested to understand who's your target user.

~~~
MBaert
Very close, it uses Electron! Front-end is written in ReactJs. The plot
library is react-vis currently, but we're replacing that soon. All the
zoom/pan logic we implemented ourselves. Backend is a completely separate
process. We've chosen for this architecture as it gives us the flexibility to
easily change from desktop product to a web/server product, if we feel like
that would be a better fit :) Target users can be very broad and is something
we are still figuring out, but at the moment we see that engineers that have
to deal with data from tests or simulations are a good fit for Marple.

~~~
snickmy
Do you plan to commit back to the community your extra graph UX/UI. They look
very neat and I don't think it will jeopardize the success of your startup.
The reason why I asked about the usage of Electron (or similar) is because
they are well known to be resource hungry. Slack went down that route and
found themself in a pickle. Considering you are also doing a lot of data
manipulation in memory (I assume) this might be very expensive on a React
Stack. Anyway, something to keep in mind, don't worry about it right now.

If you are going after individual contributor, I'd spend quite some time
figuring out good integration points (ie.: Notebooks), so you are better
integrated in their workflow. I'd avoid going enterprise, because date
warehouse and data visualization are well solved problem (both in SaaS and
PaaS flavor). Source: I led data organization at mid/big companies.

~~~
NeroVanbierv
(Mbaert his comment, but his account is throttled) We were worried about the
performance of Electron as well. All data intensive work is done in a separate
process, once in react/electron no data manipulation is needed anymore. So far
it works quite ok, performance upgrades we find in electron usually don't have
anything to do with the data.

Thank you for the info, we're still finding our position in the market.
Figuring out the perfect use case and integration in a certain workflow will
be key indeed! Feel free to contact us in private if you like to discuss more
in detail about your experiences, we'd love to hear more :)

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IfOnlyYouKnew
For some reason, your Website is broken on Safari: The images only show as a
gray vertical line, about 5px high. Right-click -> "open image in new tab"
works, so I'm guessing it's a CSS issue?

~~~
mbreese
Works for me in Safari (Mac Catalina and iOS).

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
Yeah, it worked for me as well after reloading. Then it didn't work again on
the next reload. And once I opened developer tools, it always worked.

~~~
MBaert
(other co-founder here) Thanks for the heads-up! Might be slightly overloaded
at the moment

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julosflb
Nice! Having developped a tool similar in features at my current job, I'm
about to start on my own a similar projects... Happy to see that this area get
some traction.

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raghavkhanna
Tried it out, looks nice :) Is there a quick screenshot feature? That would be
really helpful for sharing analysis and storing important views.

~~~
MBaert
Thanks :D We're working on an export feature to quickly share or paste in a
ppt etc.. But for now you'll have to rely on your printscreen or snipping tool
skills.

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dvt
This looks great, congrats on the launch! Are you taking advantage of any
hardware acceleration (eg GPU or CPU vectorization)?

~~~
NeroVanbierv
Thanks, cool question. The insane performance gains we have when visualising
are mostly because of conceptual decisions we made. One such thing is that we
don't try to plot more datapoints than there are pixels on the users screen.
But when a user does calculations on data (e.g. a low pass filter), we really
have to do all the math. So in that case we are mostly using numpy (python)
operations, which are optimised in C already. But I don't know if this
includes vectorisation

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jrdzha
Is this a system that runs on a laptop or is it on cloud?

~~~
NeroVanbierv
On your own laptop for now. This has the advantage that your data is already
there on your local disk - no need for uploading. But with some minor changes
we can run it in the cloud too

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wrnr
Best guess they use an integral images to do the zooming

~~~
MBaert
Good guess! We do some cool subsampling (certainly on big files) to be able to
show a lot of datapoints.

~~~
wrnr
Maybe the financial industry is interested in it, they have time series too

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blader_johny
Site is broken (broken images). Fix it before you launch.

~~~
dang
Please don't be a jerk on HN, especially not in Show HN threads, which have
special rules:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html).

~~~
quickthrower2
Jerk might be a strong word, I think he/she might have been trying to help,
but it comes across a bit terse.

~~~
dang
It's true, I felt it was a bit of a strong word even when posting it. But
naked imperatives ("Fix it before you launch") come across as aggressive in
casual English nowadays.

