May 2025 progress update
May 2025 progress update
A lot of progress has been made on all the project disciplines, this month we have progress update on the hard- and software as well as documentation and production.
Software
The past weeks lots of progress has been made on the launcher firmware. The launcher firmware will allow you to start installed apps from a special partition on the flash chip. You will also be able to browse a repository with apps created by other users, manage system settings and automatically download and install new versions of both the firmware and apps.
Not all functionality has been implemented yet but all basic functionality works, you can start apps, install apps via USB and most importantly you can connect to WiFi and update the firmware once new versions become available.
The launcher firmware has been published on Github, you can find the repository here if you are interested in reading through the source code. And of course we accept contributions, feel free to create issues or pull requests and join in the fun of building open source software.
Hardware
After extensive testing with the first revision of the board we have manufactured and shipped out a batch of revision 2 boards to the developers who chose to be part of the field test. If you signed up for being part of the field test you should have gotten a notification that your order has been shipped. If not please contact us via email.
As mentioned previously the revision 2 boards are fully software compatible with the prototype revision 1 boards, but one big change was made compared to revision 1: these new boards use an EBYTE E22-900M22S LoRa module instead of the Ai-Thinker RA-01SH module earlier revisions used. This new LoRa module uses a TCXO, a temperature compensated crystal oscillator, to generate the reference clock for the LoRa radio chip. This prevents frequency drift due to temperature changes, which in turn results in improved range and receiver sensitivity.
In addition to the module having better performance there is another important reason for the change: this new module has already been certified for compliance with both CE and FCC regulations. This will make it easier for Tanmatsu to pass its own compliance testing at the test lab.
Currently we are working on getting the radio testing firmware for running tests like fixed frequency broadcasting and the test related documentation ready. This is a process that does not produce much visible results but which is required to be done before we can ship our product to the customers.
And about production: we are going to do one more production run (revision 3) to fix a couple of tiny production issues we found when manufacturing the revision 2 boards. While these issues do not cause any problems for the end user they do pose a problem for mass production. Specifically the new revision fixes an issue we found with the ESD diode on the USB-C port and a manufacturing problem with the audio jack.
We plan on having this lab test firmware ready soon and once the revision 3 boards arrive we will ship them to the test lab we work with to have the board tested for compliance with the relevant regulations.
Our current expectation is that the production version of Tanmatsu will ship before the end of August 2025.
Now that an extra board revision needs to be made we will have to do an extra production run. This means we will have boards left over from both the revision 2 and future revision 3 batch. If you are a developer or engineer and with to receive your order early then you can sign up for the field test to receive a fully software (and add-on hardware) compatible revision 2 or revision 3 Tanmatsu, which we will ship out much earlier than the final version of the product.
Documentation
More and more documentation gets written and published over at the documentation section of the Nicolai Electronics website. Be sure to check this part of our website every once in a while for more technical information, explanations on how the product works and getting started guides.
The Tanmatsu documentation website will soon be split off from the main Nicolai Electronics website, this will allow us to publish the markdown source files for the documentation in a Github repository, allowing the community to contribute to the documentation.
Github project and issue tracker
To give more insight into what is going on in between these blog posts we have created a public Github project which tracks progress and shows what we are working on. You can find the project here.
Linked to the Github project we have also created a central location for the community to send in issues. If you have a suggestion or bugreport you can create an issue on the issue tracker.
Community
Our Discord community is growing, if you want to get the latests updates, ask questions and see what other community members are up to please join us!
