Tech giants start by disassembling systems

Chapter 6 The Secrets of Flight Control

The lounge was small, containing only a single bed, a small table, and a wardrobe.

Su Chen sat on the edge of the bed and closed his eyes.

In his mind, he focused his attention in the direction of "looking inward," and the semi-transparent system panel reappeared.

[Product Analysis System]

I. Virtual Disassembly Lab (Lv.1)

II. Industry Gain Halo (Lv.1)

Su Chen silently recited in his mind, "Enter the virtual disassembly lab."

The next second, his consciousness seemed to be drawn away from the real world by a gentle force.

When he "opened his eyes" again, he found himself standing in a huge, pure white space.

There were no walls, no ceiling, no horizon—only soft white light from all directions, but not glaring. Beneath your feet was a faint grid of squares, marked with precise scales, like a 3D modeling space created by some kind of CAD software.

A user interface floated in the center of the space, similar to the system panel he saw in reality, but more refined.

[Virtual Disassembly Lab - Control Panel]

• Product simulation: Enter the product name and model

• Knowledge Acceleration: Retrieving Academic/Technical Documents

• Solution simulation: Create design solutions and conduct test simulations.

"Let's familiarize ourselves with the environment first." Su Chen suppressed his excitement and took a few steps in the virtual space.

His body could move normally, and his sense of touch and vision were exactly the same as in the real world. The only difference was that there was no fatigue here—the system description stated that the virtual space used "subjective time," and while he studied here for eight hours, his body was actually in a deep sleep.

"Alright, let's not waste any more time." Su Chen walked to the control panel.

In the "Product Simulation" field, he typed five words:

DJI Phantom 4.

The control panel responds almost instantly.

A beam of light shone down from above, and a brand-new DJI Phantom 4 drone appeared out of thin air three meters in front of Su Chen.

The white body, four rotating arms, and the gimbal camera at the bottom—it's exactly the same as the Phantom 4 he'd seen countless times in his previous life, even perfectly replicating the matte texture of the surface.

Su Chen stepped forward and reached out to touch the outer casing of the machine.

The texture was incredibly realistic. He could even feel the slight bumps and textures on the surface of the plastic casing, as well as the weight of the battery inside.

"Start disassembling," he mentally commanded.

The Phantom 4's body began to slowly "unfold"—not in a physical sense, but like a 3D exploded view, all the components began to separate, arrange, and float in an orderly manner in the air.

The outer shell is divided into a top cover and a bottom cover.

The brushless motors at the ends of the four rotating arms were separated individually, and each motor was further disassembled into a rotor, stator, bearing and housing.

The core flight control motherboard is suspended in the center, and each chip on it is clearly labeled with its model and function.

The binocular vision obstacle avoidance module was broken down into a camera, an image processing chip, and a support structure.

The three-axis gimbal system is broken down into three brushless motors, an IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit), and a control board.

Battery, ESC, GPS module, image transmission module, remote control receiver...

A total of 127 parts were neatly suspended around Su Chen, each with a detailed parameter label.

Su Chen's breathing became rapid.

Having worked as a hardware product manager for fifteen years in his previous life, he knew all too well what was in front of him.

This is not a drone.

This is the culmination of DJI's technological expertise, developed over several years with the investment of thousands of engineers and hundreds of millions of dollars. From flight control algorithms to visual recognition, from gimbal control to image transmission solutions, each module represents the cutting edge of engineering in this field.

And now, it has been completely disassembled and placed in front of him.

Su Chen forced himself to calm down.

He knew he couldn't bite off more than he could chew. There was so much to study in Phantom 4, but his primary goal for tonight was singular—

Flight control system.

The flight control system is the brain of a drone. It determines the drone's flight stability, wind resistance, hovering accuracy, and handling feel.

For Hongyuan Intelligent, the biggest weakness of the Flyer F1 is not the camera or the battery life, but the flight control.

Hongyuan uses the most common open-source flight control solution on the market—a general-purpose flight control board based on the Pixhawk architecture, plus a customized version manufactured by Hengxinda. The advantages of this solution are that it is cheap, mature, and has good compatibility, but the disadvantages are that its performance ceiling is low and its tuning space is limited.

To give an analogy, it's like putting a grocery-getter's engine on a race car—it can run, but it won't run fast.

Su Chen focused his attention on the Phantom 4's flight control motherboard.

The system automatically magnifies the motherboard, making the internal structure of each chip clearly visible. The main processor, coprocessor, IMU sensor, barometer, magnetometer... the function, model, and supplier information of each component are displayed as labels floating beside it.

But Su Chen wasn't focused on the hardware itself—Hongyuan couldn't afford or manufacture flight control chips of the same level as DJI's—he was focused on the software aspects.

"Retrieve the algorithm architecture of the flight control firmware," Su Chen instructed the system.

A huge algorithm architecture diagram was then displayed next to the flight controller motherboard.

Attitude estimation algorithm, PID controller parameters, sensor fusion strategy, GPS navigation logic, failure protection mechanism... all the core logic of the flight control firmware is presented to him in the form of a visual flowchart.

Su Chen began to study them one by one.

This was the work he was most familiar with in his previous life as a hardware product manager—understanding the underlying logic of technical solutions and identifying key areas for optimization. The difference was that in his previous life, he could only read documentation, listen to engineers' explanations, and look at test data. Now, however, he could directly "see" every step of the algorithm's operation.

Two hours later, Su Chen put down the sensor fusion module he was studying and let out a long sigh of relief.

He found what he was looking for.

The reason why DJI Phantom 4's flight control far surpasses its competitors is not due to breakthroughs in a single technology, but to the integrated optimization of the entire system—the fusion accuracy of sensor data, the response speed of the control loop, and the collaborative efficiency between modules. Every aspect has been refined to the extreme.

This system-level optimization capability is a moat that DJI has built up over ten years, and it is not something that any small company can replicate in a short period of time.

But Su Chen doesn't need to be copied.

What he needs is to "understand the principles and then achieve the best performance within his own hardware capabilities".

Hongyuan's flight controller uses a general-purpose architecture, and its hardware performance is far inferior to DJI's. However, the software aspect of the general-purpose architecture also has a lot of redundancy and waste—like clothes made for everyone, they don't fit anyone.

If Su Chen could design a deeply customized flight control firmware for Hongyuan's existing hardware platform—

Redundant compatibility layer code was removed, the filtering algorithm for sensor fusion was optimized, the PID control parameters were readjusted, and feedforward compensation was added to improve response speed...

He is confident that he can improve the Flyer F1's flight stability and handling by at least 30 percent without changing any hardware.

With some minor hardware modifications—such as replacing the IMU sensor with a higher precision one or adding a barometer for redundancy—the overall improvement can reach more than 50%.

What does a 50% improvement in flight control performance mean?

This means that a Hongyuan Flyer priced at 2999 yuan can approach the performance of competing products priced at five or six thousand yuan in terms of core flight experience.

This is a case of dimensional reduction attack.

"However, this is only the flight control part," Su Chen calmly reminded himself. "The competitiveness of a drone depends not only on the flight control, but also on image transmission, gimbal, battery life, and appearance design... Every aspect needs improvement."

However, he is currently facing time constraints and a shortage of funds, making it impossible for him to address all aspects at once.

We must find a breakthrough point: a "minimum viable product".

Flight controller firmware optimization is the breakthrough point with the least investment and the fastest results.

No need to change the production line, no need to remake the mold, no need to purchase a large number of new parts—just rewrite a firmware and burn it into the existing flight controller board, and the product can be completely transformed.

Su Chen opened the "Solution Demonstration" function in the virtual space and began to design a new flight control firmware architecture.

He combined the sensor fusion strategy and control algorithm ideas he learned from the Phantom 4 with the hardware parameters of Hongyuan's existing flight controller board to build a brand-new firmware framework.

The system's "knowledge acceleration" function made his thinking speed incredibly fast. The algorithmic logic that he needed to repeatedly consult literature to understand in his previous life, he could now fully understand and remember after just one reading.

Time flies by in the virtual space.

Six hours later—though to the outside world it was only a night's sleep—Su Chen completed the preliminary architecture design of the new flight control firmware.

He looked at the floating architecture diagram in front of him, a slight smile playing on his lips.

This is just the first step. The firmware architecture is in place, but writing it into runnable code, conducting simulation tests, and tuning and optimizing parameters still requires a lot of work.

However, he is confident that he can complete all the work from the architecture to the programmable firmware within three days.

"Exit the virtual lab."

Su Chen's consciousness withdrew from the virtual space.