Hi!

Our campaign crossed 500 backers this week! Thank you so much to everyone for your kind support! All of us in the Cool Tech Zone feel so lucky to have this opportunity to share our little music player with so many people.

This week we were intending to talk about the design of Tangara’s case, but some illnesses in the team have left us without time to do a proper write-up. So instead we’ll tell you about the case design next week, while this week I’ll be giving you a short update on how things are going with our pre-production work.

Case Refinements

As I said, we’ll share more about this next week, but we (well, mostly Erin) have been making some great improvements to Tangara’s case. The improved design is slightly slimmer, is easier to produce, has nicer feeling fittings, and even has room for an easily replaced transparent cover in front of the display!

On the left is a CNC prototype of our previous design. On the right is a 3D printed prototype of the new design (a new CNC prototype should arrive this week).

Packaging

One of the tricky things about having so many backers is that a lot of processes that work fine for 100 devices, don’t really work when you’ve got to pack and ship 500 or 1000 devices.

To help us scale up our packing process, we’ve gotten a die-line made up for a small folded cardboard insert that fits inside the boxes we’re using. This will hold each device securely, be faster for us to pack consistently than other methods, and is a reasonably environmentally friendly approach, as cardboard is easy to recycle.

CE and FCC Compliance

We had hoped that we would have regulatory EMC work finished up before the completion of our campaign, but we’ve had some difficulty finding a testing lab in Sydney that we’re happy to work with. We are still making good progress however, and it’s unlikely that these difficulties will affect our production timelines.

One nice win for us is that, due to how successful this campaign has been, we’ve been able to justify acquiring the equipment needed to do more thorough pre-compliance testing ourselves. This should reduce the risk of major compliance issues down the track.

Firmware Development

In amongst the pre-production work, we’re also making steady progress on improving Tangara’s firmware. Most recently, we’ve made some substantial performance improvements and implemented a few more important features, including seeking support and gapless playback.

Thanks Again!

That’s all we have for this week. Thanks so much to everyone again for your support!