At noon of mid-July in the middle of July, in a parking lot on Midsummer Road in the Pudong New Area, Shanghai, Zhang Cheng activated his car parked by the roadside by manipulating the mobile phone App. He then demonstrated to us the functions of unlocking the door, lifting the window, and opening the sunroof.
Zhang Cheng is the founder and CEO of Lianyun Technology, which was established at the end of 2013. The above control functions are realized through the "black box" installed in the car's OBD interface. This is a product developed by their team. In addition, information such as fault prediction, vehicle status analysis, mileage statistics, driving behavior analysis, and battery voltage level can be viewed on the App.
Those who are familiar with OBD know that if you only get the data of the standard OBD protocol, the manufacturers can do very little control; the above-mentioned more practical control functions are often required to obtain the car manufacturer CANBUS protocol, these are precisely the advantages of Zhang Cheng. .
In 2004, Zhang Cheng jumped from LG to Shanghai General Motors' Pan-Asian Technology R&D Center. During Pan-Asian, he came into contact with CANbus technology and accumulated a great deal of experience, which became a cornerstone of his future business. CANBUS is equivalent to the neural network of the car and is a very central part of the vehicle. The transmission of various sensor data on the car is inseparable from it.
Zhang Cheng used “to catch up with a good opportunity†to describe the CANBUS that he initially contacted. For domestic joint venture car brands, the technology was mostly in the hands of foreigners, and car manufacturers were not open to the outside world, so they mastered this technology. Very few engineers. For most people, acquiring this technology is tantamount to winning a "golden rice bowl."
One thing that made Zhang Cheng quite impressed was that he received a joint venture brand project. Initially, they tested and matched according to information provided by foreign engineers, but the meter was not normal, the windows could not be lifted, and the air conditioning could not work. Later it was discovered that "the foreigners have reservations."
Zhang Cheng led the team to reorganize each of the routes and each piece of information, and finally found out the reason—the lack of “timed heartbeat packets†(sent at regular intervals to inform the server that the client is still working). By adding a heartbeat package, the car's instrumentation will eventually show normal. After solving this problem, it will not only allow foreign car makers to see each other's eyes, but also make local manufacturers feel that they are "contending faces."
Many people feel boring about the complicated bus architecture, but Zhang Cheng is very excited to face such complicated data: thousands of information, tens of thousands of signals, find out each signal priority, arbitration relationship, effective value... If it is made, it is a set of languages ​​for the car.
In terms of products, Zhang Cheng's work is equivalent to compiling a car "dictionary": describing each instruction and defining the car's way of speaking. For example, a car has hundreds of electronic components. How do they communicate with each other? What is the language of each group? Have their own specific grammar. “Building a car language is very interesting,†says Zhang Cheng. It takes about half a year to complete such a “dictionaryâ€. This is both manual work and brain work.
After working in Pan-Asia for 8 years, long-term infiltration in the automotive industry made Zhang Cheng realize that “cars are like the process of feature phones to smart phones. The Internet can do a lot of things, but the premise is to link them together before they know There was nothing.†Later he took the initiative to give up his “golden rice bowl,†and at the end of 2013, he established a car-linking technology with several other partners to thoroughly invest in car networking.
The App is used to control the vehicle. The means to achieve this is a "black box" installed in the car's OBD interface. This is one of the products they created. Through the connection between the mobile phone and the car, more people can see another possibility of controlling the car in addition to the car's center console and internal buttons.
At the beginning, Lianxun Technology launched a product aimed at the consumer side. The idea of ​​Zhang Cheng’s entrepreneurship was very simple: it was to develop a product that would be useful to ordinary car owners. But when they put their products on the market, Zhang found that start-ups are in a weak position, no matter if they are promoting funds or propaganda.
At that time, Zhang Cheng was also thinking about what they needed. "The car-linked Rubik's cube is our unique technology. We have split the main board and used the main board to cooperate with mirrors, HUDs, car-mounted big screens and other manufacturers to make each other's products more attractive." Consuming end products to provide solutions for other vendors, Zhang Cheng decided to use more open methods to obtain data. This practice also allows this startup company to obtain the "self bloodmaking" ability, that is to obtain profits.
At the end of the interview, Zhang Cheng showed us in the car a rear view mirror product that a certain manufacturer cooperated with them, which can control the opening of the car sunroof and air conditioner through voice. The overall operation is still smooth, Zhang Cheng said that this is the basis of smart cars.
Later, the team of Zhang Chenghe continued to explore and extended to the driving recorder, which has a weak function and a single function. "Driving recorders have no use other than touch-proof porcelain, but today we can wake it up remotely, for example, by looking inside the car or in the surrounding environment. This allows the product experience to be improved," he said.
Zhang Cheng has always advocated the rigorous development spirit of Japan and Germany. "You look at some small stores in Japan. Selling a tofu can sell for 100 years. Because it's rigorous in quality and solid, you can see the difference between each other." For his products, Zhang Cheng has always maintained such Attitude. Because of this, they have become the vehicle rear-loading product solutions provider for companies such as Ali Yun OS and 360. In front-loading, they have already had cooperation intentions with the two auto makers.
However, the main reason that restricts the further expansion of their scale is that there are not many types of products that fit the product itself. This is because the communication protocol of each car manufacturer is not the same. The development phase of vehicle adaptation is relatively time-consuming. Zhang Cheng uses the “universal translator†to describe the current development work of the team and translate the communication protocols of different car manufacturers into his own language. Currently there are more than ten models that can be adapted.
Zhang Cheng’s ultimate goal is to create a system like Jarvis in the movie “Iron Man,†which can exist in various terminals: watches, mobile phones, smart mirrors, and car screens. When the driver changes to the next car, the previous driving habit can be seamlessly switched to another vehicle. This goal is attractive both for the front-loading and after-loading markets, and it can even gain more market share. This may be Zhang Cheng’s greater ambition.
