eugenPtr @EugenPtr - Twitter Profile

EugenPtr retweeted

7 days ago

you can just do things. you can just have a stupidly simple idea for a drone detection system, so obvious in your head that surely it already exists you can just spend the next weeks hyper focusing on research, only to realize it's not that simple, and maybe you're onto something you can just join a European defense hackathon and get the parts for your first prototype delivered 1 hour before it starts you can just spend 48 hours manically soldering, 3D modeling, printing, hot gluing, taping, cutting, coding firmware, fixing bugs, unrolling fiber optic cables, testing with a mini drone, building a pitch deck, and demoing it on stage where it kind of works but doesn't quite detect the drone you can just apply to an official FPV drone detection crash test in Ukraine, run by Ukraine's Ministry of Defense, without even having a working prototype yet, and get officially invited a few weeks later you can just realize you now have one month to build a working version from scratch, pack all your tools, and fly to the middle of Romania, to your cofounder's house, to spend 3 weeks hacking from 10am to 3am while frantically ordering more parts and bashing your heads against the infinite struggle of building hardware, electronics and software all tightly coupled together you can just try to open a company and a bank account in Portugal while in Romania, and fight the bureaucracy so hard that your bro has to call his mom to physically walk into a civil registry office in the countryside of Portugal, so she tells the registry lady to call you, so you can unlock the company formation process you can just fly back to Portugal to open the bank account in person, go to a Portuguese army innovation conference, and realize how hard it is to innovate in defense without being at war, and how far most European armies still are from the reality of what's happening in Ukraine right now you can just track down and buy the only Mac Studio M4 Max in Portugal, second hand, from a guy in the middle of the country, because it's sold out everywhere with an 8 week waiting list, since it's the only computer with enough compute and low enough power draw to live inside our portable field hub and detect FPV drones in real time you can just decide to travel to a country at war to test your product, and have the trip land just one week after the largest combined Shahed and cruise missile attack that country had seen in over four years of war you can just fly to Budapest, meet your cofounder and spend 2 days in a tiny hobbit house outside the city assembling and soldering the last sensor node, then drive last minute to a field full of wild horses to test the full system with a simple DJI drone, not really sure if it's going to work on the crash test you can just race to the Budapest train station straight off the field, buried in luggage, and board a 20 hour overnight train to Kyiv all by yourself, then talk your way past the Hungarian border police when they get scandalized that a Portuguese guy is rolling into wartime Ukraine with what looks like a weapon in a huge peli case, when it's really just a computer and homemade microphones connected by fiber optics you can just get to Kyiv and spend 2 days locked in your hotel room finishing the system hub, failing to get a GPS fix indoors to test the setup from your hotel bed, while air raid alerts go off every day and you head down to the shelter to wait them out with the other guests, passing around a plastic cup of Ukrainian champagne from Crimea you can just rent a car on the outskirts of Kyiv, get lost because the address was missing one letter after the number, walk 20 minutes at night to find the rental office, and finally get a reliable Skoda to drive to the crash test site at an undisclosed location you can just offer to pick up another participant from the train station on the morning of the test, whose train runs late because it had to be evacuated midway, and strike up a great conversation about defense, AI, Ukraine and acoustic detection the whole way there you can just show up late because you had to navigate to the site on pure vibes and old school map reading, and then start setting up alone while nothing seems to be working you can just beg the organizers for a stronger powerbank to feed the hub, realize after an hour of troubleshooting that the 4th node is dead (and you need at least 4 to detect anything), swap its GPS module right there in the field, and watch it all come alive 5 minutes before the first FPV test flight you can just spend the whole day in the field, eating dust under sun, wind and rain, alongside a field of other manufacturers all chasing the same problem in their own way, while your system hums along detecting and tracking real combat-grade FPV drones in real time, 50 meters out, plotting them on a map like radar, built from a pile of prototyping parts hacked together beautifully, to become a passive acoustic system that nothing can jam, made of 4 homemade microphones connected by fiber optics to a central compute hub you can just not have the official numbers yet, because the organizers are still processing them, but know exactly what you saw with your own eyes, a handmade system tracking combat drones in real time in the middle of a war and use that as fuel to drive you even more obsessed with cracking this problem you can just then take an overnight train to Lviv with all your gear, to compare notes with one of the leading Ukrainian acoustic-detection companies, only to evacuate the station over a bomb threat with your suspicious-looking giant peli hardware case you can just carry on toward Poland, meet a lovely Ukrainian soldier on the train who hands you drip coffee and gives you genuinely great product feedback, but ultimately fails to convince the border officer that you're not transporting a bomb you can just be pulled off the train with all your luggage and spend the next 12 hours questioned by 3 different teams of customs officers, in varying levels of broken english, about who you are, what you're doing, and what every single piece of electronics you're carrying actually does you can just have your whole prototype held at the border for further inspection, maybe to be returned in a couple of months, because nobody could quite believe it's just a regular computer and a bunch of homemade microphones connected by fiber optics you can just find a way to still make it to Vilnius in time for day 2 of the NATO-Ukraine innovators forum, despite losing your flight, and schmooze your way onto the stage to pitch in front of a panel of European defense VCs, running on coffee and zero sleep, in a way that makes sure they remember you you can just do all of that in 80 days, from the initial idea in your head to a working prototype, built with your own hands, that detects and tracks fiber optic guided FPV combat drones in real time, the ones that cannot be detected any other way, in a real test in the middle of Ukraine, so that fewer soldiers die at the frontline to this new class of weapon that has redefined modern warfare forever you can just start doing things and end up with a passive, electronic-warfare-immune acoustic detection system for FPV drones, cheap enough to blanket the frontline, holding up under live battlefield conditions in the most battle hardened country on earth right now you can just do things.

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eugenPtr

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