Year: 2023

Los Gatos, California – June 14^th, 2023 – We are excited to share with you the latest developments in our product development, as we have been hard at work over the past few months. From the enclosure production to user interface improvements and enhanced functionality and expanded capabilities, our team has been incredibly busy making sure that our product exceeds expectations

But first, I’d like to extend my congratulations to Enzo Dougherty for participating in the Seventy48 race (a 70-nautical mile journey from Tacoma, WA to Port Townsend, WA) using one of our early prototypes. We couldn’t be prouder of Enzo’s achievement, and we’re also grateful for the valuable feedback he and Michael provided us.

Photo Credit: Michael Dougherty

Our production process is coming together, and we’ve just received the first batch of articles for inspection from our enclosure mold manufacturer. We’re delighted to report that the parts turned out great! While we’re fine-tuning some cosmetic details, we anticipate our first production batch will be ready to launch in July! Additionally, we are thrilled to announce that we have successfully passed IP68 certification criteria test (1.5m immersion for 30 minutes). We are confident that we can exceed these standards, and we’re now just looking for a deeper pool to test it!

We have an exciting update regarding our printed circuit board manufacturer. The pre-production boards are now complete and will be shipped tomorrow. Next week, we’ll have a busy schedule of testing to ensure everything runs smoothly. If all goes according to plan, we should be able to finalize our first production batch to be released in July.

We owe a big thanks to our pilot users, such as Enzo, for providing us with a wealth of constructive feedback. A consistent message that we heard loud and clear was the need to improve the user-friendliness of our device. While having both a keypad and a touch screen offered great benefits, we realized that we could do much more to maximize their potential. Therefore, we dedicated some time towards improving our user interface over the past few weeks, and we’ve come up with some innovative solutions that promise to make our user experience simpler and more intuitive. We still have some work to do in this area, but we’re confident that we’re on the right track.

Regarding our timeline, we’re aiming to ship our first units towards the end of summer. Before the official release, we’re planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign, and we’re excited to offer our supporters the opportunity to secure a $300 discount in exchange for a simple $1 deposit. We believe that this is a fantastic deal and we encourage you to check out the details on our website at https://www.maptattoo.com/payment. Stay tuned for more updates as we get closer to our launch date!

That’s all for now! Stay tuned for more updates, and don’t forget to follow us on social media for the latest news and announcements. If you have any questions or ideas to share, please don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re always eager to hear from you!

Thank you all for your support

– Erwan Kerebel

Los Gatos, California – January 29^th, 2023 – We all love our smartphones and tablets. Their versatility and the breadth of the apps ecosystem makes them incredible tools for a flurry of usages. For us sailors, kayak and small boat owners, Navionics did an awesome job putting together an app that is so helpful to prepare our trips from anywhere but let’s face it our LCD screens are less than optimal when we leave the comfort of our day-to-day life and start living our adventures outside.

There is a simple reason for that: in order for an LCD screen to be readable in outdoor environment with a bright ambient light, the LCD screen’s brightness needs to exceed the intensity of light that is reflected from the display surface. To be comfortably viewed by human eyes, the LCD’s screen brightness needs to exceed its reflected light by a factor of 2.5 at minimum. If we want to use LCDs outside in direct sunlight, that leaves us with 2 options: accept a lower contrast (which you can see in the photos above) or push the brightness to the maximum if the screen accepts that. Most LCDs in our smartphones and tablets cannot achieve that and for those that can, the power consumption becomes outrageous, which causes other issues on our small boats and kayaks.

The E-Ink screens we adopted at MAPTATTOO rely on reflected, not emitted, light. Just like we enjoy using the natural environment to our advantage in our adventures, the E-Ink screen take advantage of the ambient light!

In an E-Ink display, a clear fluid suspends millions of tiny capsules filled with black and white pigment. The black pigment is negatively charged, while the white pigment is positively charged, and the fluid layer is sandwiched between two electrode layers divided into regions. Each region is one “pixel” in the display.

This whole process is called electrophoresis. Depending on how the electrode layers are charged, the ratio of pigment in each region changes, and that ratio is what produces varying degrees of grayscale on the screen.

The other advantage of the E-Ink screens is that the “image” stays on the screen even when you stop applying a voltage on the electrodes, power is only needed when you want to update a section of the screen. At MAPTATTOO, we adopted a proprietary algorithm in order to intelligently refresh the screen in order to even further limit our power consumption.

In one of our next updates, we will likely talk about power consumption on small boats as this is also a key constraint in our adventures.

– Erwan Kerebel

Ceillac, France – January 2^nd, 2023 – Last June, we had 3 participants in the Race to Alaska (https://www.r2ak.com) test our Pilot Units. One of them ended up capsizing in the Strait of Juan de Fuca in dire conditions and lose our prototype but the other 2 reached Ketchika, AK successfully. Congratulations to them!

We have gathered a ton of very positive feedback regarding the user experience, screen readability and battery life but obviously, these testing conditions revealed a number of flaws that we had to work hard to resolve:

• We are resolving the waterproofing issues by changing the screen glueing technique, reviewing the USB port and getting tighter tolerances offered by injection molded enclosures (the molds will be manufactured around february 2023)
• We will be enhancing the User Experience significantly in our final version. One way of achieving that will be by adding a “center” button in our directional keypad. Most of the functions will be accessible with a single key press (no key combination)
• We are improving the performance significantly as well (adding more storage to store the charts uncompressed, improvement of our deciphering algorithm as well as development of charts loading optimization such as lazy loading and partial loading)
• The magnetic charging port ended up showing corrosion issues. We initially thought of using wireless charging and wireless (wi-fi) for loading the charts but these development would have deteriorated the performance and efficiency of the charging system. Battery efficiency is critical on our small boats so we did not want to make any compromise there. We have decided to go back to a standard USB-C charging port. The port will be waterproof (IP68) and protected by an additional rubber door.

We think these improvements will help make MAPTATTOO a much better product and we can’t wait to show you these in our final production version.

Our plan is to launch a crowdsourcing campaign this Spring (2023) and start shipping soon after.

Stay tuned, thank you for your support and we wish you a ton of exciting adventures and explorations in 2023…

– Erwan Kerebel