ryethenovel Chapter 64 New Year Test
Chapter 64 New Year Test
In early November 2018.
Su Chen held his first formal annual planning meeting.
Previously, all of Hongyuan's major decisions were made by Su Chen alone in his office. He wrote on the whiteboard, did the accounting on paper, and made phone calls. But now the company has more than 400 people and three business lines operating simultaneously, Su Chen knows that he can no longer manage it all by himself.
There were six people sitting in the conference room.
Su Chen. Zhou Ming. Zhang Lei. Meng Xiaosui. Li Wei. Fang Xu.
This is Hongyuan's core team: administration, technology, sales, finance, and legal.
Su Chen didn't use PowerPoint. He wrote three lines on the whiteboard.
[Three lines in 2018]
I. Consumer segment: F4 design launched. F3 sales continue. Target: 40,000 units for the year.
II. Crop Protection Grade: SDK customers exceeded 30. Overseas expansion to three countries. Toyota channel expansion to six provinces.
III. Industrial Grade: R&D commenced in Q2. Southern Power Grid's intelligent technology assessment completed. An industrial flight control prototype will be launched by the end of the year.
Zhang Lei was the first to speak.
"President Su, what is the design direction for the F4? Is it still following the 'durability' approach of the F3?"
Su Chen shook his head.
The F3 is positioned as a "work drone." The F4 is positioned as a "smart work drone."
"What's the difference?"
"The core of the F3 is 'stability'—stable flight in harsh environments. The core of the F4 is 'intelligence'—centimeter-level positioning based on RTK, basic obstacle avoidance capabilities, and automatic flight path planning. These functions are not present in the F3, but are essential for industrial-grade products. Therefore, the F4 is actually a bridge product between consumer and industrial grades."
Zhang Lei's eyes lit up.
"So, the new technologies on the F4 can be directly transferred to industrial-grade products in the future?"
"Yes. The F4 is a consumer-grade product, but its technology is designed for industrial applications. It kills two birds with one stone."
Meng Xiaoxi raised her hand.
"Mr. Su, what's the approximate price range for the F4?"
"Between three and four thousand. It's a thousand yuan more expensive than the F3. But it adds RTK positioning, obstacle avoidance, and automatic flight path. For small businesses in county towns, these features mean less manual operation and higher work efficiency. They will pay for these features."
Li Wei chimed in, "President Su, how should we allocate our R&D investment? With three lines operating simultaneously, won't the financial pressure be too great?"
Su Chen nodded.
"There's definitely pressure. But we don't need all three lines to reach their peak simultaneously. The consumer segment is already generating stable profits. The crop protection segment is experiencing rapid growth. The industrial segment has just started, with relatively small initial investments. The three segments are operating at different paces—the consumer segment generates cash flow, the crop protection segment provides growth, and the industrial segment reserves for the future."
Fang Xu gave the final speech.
"President Su, what's the current status of Tianying's patent war?"
"Both sides are currently responding to lawsuits. My assessment is that a settlement will eventually be reached, because neither side has a real basis to harm the other. The essence of patent wars is deterrence, not elimination. And Tianying's current focus has shifted from 'fighting Hongyuan' to 'developing its own flight control system.' Its attention has been diverted. This is a good thing for us."
The meeting lasted an hour and a half. Everyone received their assigned tasks.
This was the first time Hongyuan had felt like he belonged to an "organization".
Previously, Su Chen was the one leading everyone. Now, there's a division of labor, a rhythm, and everyone has their own direction.
Su Chen sat alone for a while after the meeting.
He thought of his past life. Back then, he was a product manager, and his biggest regret was that he never had the chance to build a team that truly belonged to him.
Now he has it.
In mid-February, the technical feasibility assessment of China Southern Power Grid Smart Energy officially began.
The location is a high-voltage power line inspection section in Shaoguan, Guangdong. It is a mountainous environment with an altitude of 400 to 600 meters, dense vegetation, and highly variable wind conditions.
Zhang Lei went with Xiao Chen and the newly recruited engineer Xiao Wang. Su Chen didn't go—he was at the company handling contracts with Indonesian clients.
However, the night before the test, Su Chen spent three hours in the virtual disassembly lab adjusting the parameters of the flight control firmware in advance based on the environmental parameters of the patrol section provided by China Southern Power Grid Intelligent—altitude, wind speed, electromagnetic interference intensity, and GPS signal quality.
The next morning, Zhang Lei received the temporary firmware sent by Su Chen.
After scanning the code, they pulled a Southern Power Grid patrol drone equipped with Hongyuan Flight Control to a location below the high-voltage line.
The first test: hovering accuracy in an electromagnetic interference environment near high-voltage lines.
Results: The situational navigation fusion algorithm automatically switches when the GPS signal is interfered with by electromagnetic interference, and the hover drift is controlled within one meter. This is three times smaller than the three-meter drift of the existing solution from China Southern Power Grid.
The second test: stability in a valley under sudden gusts of wind.
Result: The environmental adaptive algorithm automatically adjusted the power distribution during the sudden gust of wind, and the machine did not lose control. Compared with the loss of control that occurred in the same environment with the existing solutions of China Southern Power Grid, the performance of Hongyuan Flight Control impressed the engineers from China Southern Power Grid on site.
But there are also problems.
The third test was the fusion of RTK centimeter-level positioning. Su Chen had already run the basic framework in the virtual lab, but in the real mountainous environment, the stability of the RTK signal was worse than expected—the frequency of signal interruption caused by mountain obstruction was much higher than in the plains environment.
In his report that evening, Zhang Lei wrote: "The inertial navigation fusion and environmental adaptation performance are excellent. RTK fusion requires specific optimization for mountainous environments. Conclusion: The core flight control capabilities have been verified; the RTK module requires an additional month of optimization work."
After reading the report, Su Chen entered the virtual laboratory that very night.
Three hours later, he sent Zhang Lei a compensation algorithm for RTK signal interruption in mountainous environments.
Zhang Lei no longer asks questions like, "When did you do this, Mr. Su?"
He simply replied, "Received. Verification will be completed tomorrow morning."