Hi HN,

I’m part of the team building Sniphi.

Sniphi is a modular digital nose that uses gas sensors and machine-learning models to convert volatile organic compound (VOC) data into a machine-readable signal that can be integrated into existing QA, monitoring, or automation systems. The system is currently in an R&D phase, but already exists as working hardware and software and is being tested in real environments.

The project grew out of earlier collaborations with university researchers on gas sensors and odor classification. What we kept running into was a gap between promising lab results and systems that could actually be deployed, integrated, and maintained in real production environments.

One of our core goals was to avoid building a single-purpose device. The same hardware and software stack can be trained for different use cases by changing the training data and models, rather than the physical setup. In that sense, we think of it as a “universal” electronic nose: one platform, multiple smell-based tasks.

Some design principles we optimized for:

- Composable architecture: sensor ingestion, ML inference, and analytics are decoupled and exposed via APIs/events

- Deployment-first thinking: designed for rollout in factories and warehouses, not just controlled lab setups

- Cloud-backed operations: model management, monitoring, updates run on Azure, which makes it easier to integrate with existing industrial IT setups

- Trainable across use cases: the same platform can be retrained for different classification or monitoring tasks without redesigning the hardware

One public demo we show is classifying different coffee aromas, but that’s just a convenient example. In practice, we’re exploring use cases such as:

- Quality control and process monitoring

- Early detection of contamination or spoilage

- Continuous monitoring in large storage environments (e.g. detecting parasite-related grain contamination in warehouses)

Because this is a hardware system, there’s no simple way to try it over the internet. To make it concrete, we’ve shared:

- A short end-to-end demo video showing the system in action (YouTube)

- A technical overview of the architecture and deployment model: https://sniphi.com/

At this stage, we’re especially interested in feedback and conversations with people who:

- Have deployed physical sensors at scale

- Have run into problems that smell data might help with

- Are curious about piloting or testing something like this in practice

We’re not fundraising here. We’re mainly trying to learn where this kind of sensing is genuinely useful and where it isn’t.

Happy to answer technical questions.

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Show HN: A trainable, modular electronic nose for industrial use