eurekapd Chapter 52, 3 questions
Chapter 52, 3 questions
That evening, after the all-staff meeting, Su Chen sat alone in his office and wrote three lines on the whiteboard.
[Current Three Questions]
I. Consumer-grade: F2 sales are declining, and F3 must be mass-produced before the new Tianying product - two months remaining.
II. Plant Protection Level: The SDK ecosystem is expanding, but the technical support team is understaffed, and there is a risk of declining service quality.
III. Funding: Declining consumer-grade revenue + lack of large-scale cash flow from the plant protection SDK → F3 mass production requires investment in new molds and testing equipment → funding gap of approximately three million.
Three million.
It's not a fatal number. But given that Su Chen refused the Series B funding, the three million must be resolved internally.
Financing is not an option. Every percentage point of dilution erodes the safety margin of the system's gain aura.
Su Chen picked up his pen and began to do the accounting.
Current monthly revenue is approximately 4.5 million (4 million from consumer products + 500,000 from the plant protection SDK). Monthly net profit is approximately 1.2 million.
The cumulative profit over the two months was approximately 2.4 million.
We are still 600,000 short of the 3 million needed for F3 mass production.
Six hundred thousand.
Su Chen's gaze fell on the line "Plant Protection Grade" on the whiteboard.
Ding De'an is already preparing an exclusive distribution agreement. If the agreement is signed, Toyota will pay an advance payment of approximately 800,000 yuan as an annual distribution service fee.
Eight hundred thousand. A shortfall far exceeding six hundred thousand.
But Su Chen didn't want to put the funding gap on an agreement that hadn't been signed yet.
He needs another way.
The other way is in his computer—the virtual disassembly lab.
At 11 p.m. that night, Su Chen sat in front of his computer and opened the virtual disassembly lab.
He didn't come to dismantle things. He came to create things.
The F3's flight control architecture is complete, and engineering development is largely finished. However, the key to shortening mass production time lies not in the hardware, but in the last core module of the flight control firmware.
The F3's selling point is its "stability in harsh environments"—strong winds, high temperatures, low temperatures, electromagnetic interference, and crash impacts. The core of this module is an adaptive flight control algorithm—which can adjust the control strategy in real time according to environmental parameters, rather than relying on fixed parameters.
Zhang Lei and his team have been working on this algorithm for two months. Progress is not slow, but it's not fast either. This is because each parameter adjustment requires verification through real-world testing—and each real-world test takes several days.
But Su Chen has a tool that Zhang Lei doesn't.
Virtual disassembly labs can simulate the working state of any product—including its flight performance in various extreme environments.
In the virtual lab, Su Chen can complete in one night the amount of testing that would take Zhang Lei's team a week to finish.
Su Chen created a simulated environment in the virtual laboratory—a level 4 wind, a temperature of 35 degrees Celsius, and strong electromagnetic interference. Then he put the current version of the F3 flight controller firmware into it and ran it.
The result was not good.
In high-temperature environments, the motor's power response slows down, resulting in a decrease in hovering accuracy of approximately 15%. In strong electromagnetic environments, GPS signal fluctuations cause positioning drift to exceed acceptable limits.
Su Chen began adjusting the parameters.
This is what he excels at. In his fifteen years as a product manager in his previous life, he had seen countless hardware engineers spend weeks on this aspect. But in the virtual lab, he could complete the same task in minutes.
High temperature compensation – He adjusted the temperature compensation coefficient of the motor power curve, allowing the algorithm to adjust the control strategy in real time based on data from the body temperature sensor.
Electromagnetic interference suppression – He added a fusion algorithm based on inertial navigation to the GPS signal processing layer, which automatically switches to inertial navigation compensation when the GPS signal quality deteriorates, instead of hard-suppressing it.
Each time the parameters were adjusted, the test was run again in the virtual lab. After countless practice sessions, Su Chen finally retrieved the test results at 3 a.m.
The decrease in hovering accuracy under high temperature conditions was reduced from 15% to 3%.
In a strong electromagnetic environment, the positioning drift changed from exceeding the standard to meeting the standard.
Su Chen packaged the optimized parameters and algorithm modules into a document and sent it to Zhang Lei.
The postscript consisted of only one sentence: "Take it to the site for verification tomorrow morning."