Los Gatos, California– September 19th, 2023 – Our injection molding supplier sent us this video of our enclosure mass production:
Front Enclosure Injection Molding
What you can see on this video is the production of the front of our enclosure. It is the most complicated polycarbonate part because of the dimension constraints required for waterproofing the USB-C connector and ensuring the seal with the back part. The part is in Polycarbonate to ensure impact and flex resistance. We made it translucent so that our green and blue LEDs are visible but also to facilitate the assembly of the screen (it is easier to see if the adhesive is properly set). This part will actually be invisible to you because it is then overmolded with black elastomere.
Los Gatos, California– September 18th, 2023 – Small Craft Advisor recently published an article about our project.
Here is what Jerry Culik (Engineer, Technical Writer and Boat Enthusiast) said about MAPTATTOO:
“The MAPTATTOO tablet chartplotter addresses a number of the items on my wish list. The 6-inch display is much bigger than anything I’ve got now, but it’s not too big to use on my smaller boats. It has a touchscreen that’s backed up by a keypad. It will run 50 hours on its internal battery and doesn’t require a power cord “leash.” It has a waterproof USB-C fast-charge port and comes with a cable to charge it from a small solar panel or power pack with a standard USB jack. A low-cost 5 watt solar panel with a USB charging jack is light and compact – less than half a square foot in area—and ought to be able to do the job. The MAPTATTOO power consumption is so frugal, only 400 mW (or an order of magnitude less than the Garmin 44dv), that I could probably leave my power station at home.”
Los Gatos, California– September 10th, 2023 – We get it, things happen on a boat.
We designed MAPTATTOO carefully to ensure that it can resist all sorts of shocks: – We bonded our E-Ink screen to a 1.1mm Gorilla Glass panel (that is about 2X mor than typical phones and tablets)
– Our enclosure is made in polycarbonate (about 2mm thick) and is extremely resistant
– Most of the enclosure is overmolded with a thick layer of elastomer (1.5mm) to further improve shock resistance
– The screen is recessed so that it is protected from most shocks and scratches
We had a little bit of fun torturing this MAPTATTOO over the week-end:
Los Gatos, California– September 6th, 2023 – Many of you took the time to fill-in a survey and I would like to take some time to share with you a few insights.
First of all, we asked you what you were excited about:
Sunlight Readability
The first feature people are the most excited about is sunlight readability, and we agree! Using electronic devices outside can be quite a challenge, and getting the best readability in the brightest light has been driving the design of MAPTATTOO since the beginning.
50H Battery life
Following closely is the battery life of MAPTATTOO, and it makes sense; 73% of our backers plan to use MAPTATTOO on multi-days trip. Having a device able to work up to 50 hours on one charge is perfect for those long navigation sessions!
Versatility
You also love the versatility and portability offered by MAPTATTOO, 75% of you are using more than one type of boat! Sailing, motor, multihull, kayak, inflatable, row boat… you are planning on bringing MAPTATTOO onboard no matter the type of ship!
Lastly, we asked what future developments you were hoping we integrate into our roadmap and you gave us great feedback! Some of the key priorities will be:
Ability to create a route without a Laptop
Ability to personalize the screens and widgets
Support for inland waters
Display AIS / NMEA data via USB Gateway
Having your feedback is super key for us, knowing what’s important for you allows us to focus our efforts on what matters most! We will continue to implement features to match your use as best as possible.
Los Gatos, California– June 14th, 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!
Los Gatos, California– January 29th, 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.
Top Left: “Fog Bow” Photo by Brooke Longval, Top Right: “SpearHead SurfCity” Photo by Matthew O’Brien, Bottom Left: “Embrun” Tebeo.tv, Bottom Right: “Profile Picture” Tim Finkenbinder
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.
Image Credit: Peter Sobolev/Shutterstock
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.
Ceillac, France– January 2nd, 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…
Los Gatos, California– May 10th, 2022 – Vincent and I have been busy the last few weeks, getting ready to deliver our first pilot units to our beta testers participating in the Race to Alaska 2022 (https://www.r2ak.com).
Vincent is focusing on our the hardware and firmware development. He designed the schematics of the Printed Circuit Board (PCB), selected the components and oversaw the manufacturing process. This run is our third since we started the development of MAPTATTOO. As with any hardware electronic project, it takes time to get things right. Several weeks for the design, a couple weeks for drawing and routing the multi-layer Printed Circuit Board, a few more weeks to manufacture the boards, assemble the hundreds of components and a few more weeks again for bringing the boards up and make sure they run OK under normal conditions. Electronic components supply chain issues forced us to adapt and redesign multiple times when components became unavailable. Our boards for the pilot are finally assembled in Ontario and Vincent will soon be able to bring them up.
Debugging our prototype board
On my end, I have been working on the software for a couple years now. The largest part of the development was to develop a chart reader that could read the chart data originating from organizations such as the NOAA and CHS. We decided to develop our own chart reader rather than leveraging existing technology in order to adapt the reader to the unique properties of the eInk screen. The eInk screen is one of the most differentiating features of MAPTATTOO. It allows optimum reading characteristics while outside, in direct sunlight but it also requires careful control in order to optimize the screen refresh times and power consumption. The main features of the software will be ready by the end of May and will allow MAPTATTOO’s operators to view their speed, heading, their position on the chart and the ability to zoom, pan. Waypoints and routes will be loaded from standard .gpx files and will allow users to view their distance and bearing to the next waypoint. Current and Tide data will also be presented on the chart, based on NOAA and CHS tide stations. I still have to work on a few more features to better represent some S57 Chart features and obviously, correct a few remaining bugs.
Software development
The enclosure is another critical part of the development process. It needs to be beautiful, waterproof and manufacturable. Rather than developing an injection mold right away, we are producing our pilot units using a urethane casting method which allows for a good finish with a reasonable tooling cost. We just received the First Article Inspection which looks good but has a few defects we want to correct for the remaining pilot units. We have the screens as well which are bonded to a 1.1mm Gorilla Glass Pane. This glass pane should offer sufficient scratch and shock resistance.
Enclosure First Article Inspection with the screen in place
So all in all, things are looking good and we still think we will be able to get the units ready before the start of the Race to Alaska. For those of you using one of our pilot units, we encourage you to start working on your routes and waypoints. MAPTATTOO supports the .gpx file format and within the .gpx file, standalone waypoints, routes and tracks (tracks will get converted into routes).
The following tools are good options to generate .gpx:
OpenCPN (you will need NOAA and CHS S-57 charts)
Garmin BaseCamp
GpsVisualizer (This is probably the simplest solution as the tool does not require any installation. Just navigate to https://www.gpsvisualizer.com/draw/ and start adding your standalone waypoints and/or your tracks, then export as a .gpx file. The only downside is that the trackpoints cannot be named, so you will see them simply numbered on MAPTATTOO. If you prefer having names, you could import the .gpx in BaseCamp, convert the track into a route and then name the route points in BaseCamp before exporting. Alternatively, for those of you who are familiar with the .gpx file format, you can also edit it in a text viewer and add the <name> tags inside the <trkpt> tags)
That is all for now, getting back to working on these pilot units.
