Welcome to the Tangara September update!

This month has been relatively quiet for the team, giving us a chance to take some much needed time off before we dive into a busy month of assembling production devices. That said, we still have some achievements in this update that we’re excited to share with you.

FCC Filing and User Manuals

Following our successful testing a couple of updates ago, Tangara’s FCC paperwork has finally been officially filed and approved! This approval is mostly a formality, as we already knew from the test results a couple of months ago that we passed testing, but the approval does mean that we’ve been able to finalise our user manual and get it printed.

Tangara’s user manual is ultimately something that we need to include in the box for regulatory reasons, however we wanted it to be a document that served at least some small practical purpose. To that end, we’ve included some nice diagrams and detailed disassembly instructions within the booklet. It’s no Reform Operator Handbook, but we hope you’ll enjoy having a flick through it all the same!

We got them printed and stapled at a local printshop, and have been very happy with the quality of the finished booklets.

Case Manufacturing Update

Following on from last update’s issues, manufacturing of Tangara’s case in production quantities is now well underway, and proceeding at a good pace. We expect the full batch to be ready for shipping to us in Sydney within the next week or so, lining us up to begin full device assembly around the end of the month.

We have a few images from the factory to show off to you:

Battery Cages

There are variations in the exact physical size of our production batteries, so Robin has been working on properly parameterising and improving our battery cage design to more easily support different batteries.

We’re very happy with the result; it prints fast and neatly on the 3D printers available to us, and it holds the battery securely whilst allowing for some amount of expansion in the LiPo cell.

We’ve already begun printing these cages and stocking them in preparation for assembly. The near-constant whirring of my 3D printer is a gentle reminder of the assembly work to come.

About 350 battery cages at time of writing

You may notice some colour variety in the finished cages above. We estimate that we’ll need about four to five 1 kg rolls of filament total for the first couple of Tangara production batches, so we decided to get a small variety of colours to add a little more character to your devices. We hope you enjoy it! And if you dislike the colour that you receive, then at least it’s very easy to print your own replacement cage.

See You Next Month!

That’s all we’ve got for you this time. Thank you once again for your support and attention, and stay tuned for more exciting news next time!